Economic-union Books

Although I do disagree with the direction that contributors' conclusion, this is an interesting and important little text and well worth a read.

The premise of this book is that pensions are being mismanaged by companies and investment managers to worker's detriment. The facts are misrepresented and the solutions offered are chilling. Here are some examples:

The writers believe that a company�s management should not make pension investment decisions, even thought by law, most plans are required to be maintained for the exclusive benefit of participants. (Notable exceptions to this rule are public plans and union-sponsored plans!)

Several chapters also state that workers themselves are not capable enough to manage their own pensions � they should not be allowed to make decisions as to current vs. future spending and make �mistakes� in asset allocation.

The alarming conclusion is that only 1) union leadership or 2) the government is equipped to make decisions on the $7 trillion invested in pensions.

Pensions investment decisions have not been speculative and are not short-term in nature. The Asian crisis in 1997 and tech decline 2000-present are often cited in the book as examples of mismanagement. However, almost all pension plans were under-weighted (relative to the total market) and extremely few were over-weighted in these sectors at the time of their drop. In other words, plan fiduciaries recognized some of the speculation involved in the inflated prices, and adjusted portfolios accordingly. Had this book been written in 1975, they would decry the �Nifty Fifty� market decline.

Instead of using professional investment managers that seek (and are incented for) the highest possible return given a risk profile, the authors would like to use other factors in making investment decisions. For example, will any investment decisions result in layoffs, plant closings or job flight overseas?

In other words, we must keep all our existing industries and refuse to re-train workers for the better jobs of tomorrow. This approach didn�t work too well for the Soviet Union.

Yes, it is painful when worker lose their jobs, but the growth of the US economy in the last 20 years has been due, in part, to the fact that we have exited low-skills industries, and we adapt to changes faster than any other country.

The exciting fact is that over 50% of households now own stock, and the majority of us are now owners, as well as workers. We have an opportunity to manage companies better. I agree with the foreword that CEO compensation is too high, and vote my proxies on that basis.

This book is very anti-individual and anti-shareholder.

I wonder if the reviewer from Illinois read the same book I did. If so, I think that he must have read it exclusively to knock it down. He takes things completely out of context. I found this book to be very interesting, and very pro-shareholder power. It raises significant questions on who makes the money decisions and how they make them, and offers some intriguing possibilities for the future.

Sometimes it seems like companies have become focused on "shareholder value" as if shareholders weren't human beings with many interests. For example, "shareholders" want airlines to keep prices down, to pay security checkpoint staff the bare minimum ... unless, of course, the shareholder is also flying on the airplane, in which case, they might feel that security is a more important value than thrift.

Some of these articles are a tad dry and academic, but the points they raise are really important. If you're a pension fund trustee, or a pension recipient, I urge you to read this book.

Imagine your own money being used to throw you out of a job and deny you a decent living. Millions of workers don't have to imagine this, it is a reality, as the pension funds they have bargained for in union contracts can be used to buy up their firms and throw them out of jobs.

Most people, including workers with defined benefit pension plans, don't realize how little control workers have over their pension money. This is an important issue, since pension funds currently have more than $4 trillion in assets. Pension funds are powerful actors in current financial markets.

However, the control of pension fund assets rests, not with the workers, but rather with the same sort of financial managers who run other types of funds. These financial managers often use pension fund assets to finance the type of speculative short-term investments that they make with other funds. The impact that this behavior might have on the jobs of workers for whom they are investing is not a concern for pension fund managers.

As the papers in this book make clear, this lack of concern is partially for legal reasons - the law requires that pension fund managers act in the interest of the pension plans participants and beneficiaries. But part of the failure of pension fund managers to consider the impact of investments on workers is due to fears and prejudices that go beyond the legal requirements implied by this responsibility.

For example, many funds engage in extremely risky investments at present. Investing in East Asia earlier in the nineties was extremely risky, although many pension fund managers did not become aware of this fact until after the East Asian financial crisis. Similarly, buying stock on the NASDAQ in the late nineties was also quite risky. In spite of the risks involved, hundreds of billions of dollars in pension fund money flowed into East Asia in the early and mid-nineties, and into the NASDAQ in the late nineties.

As this money flowed out of the country or into the tech economy, thousands of smaller and medium sized manufacturing businesses were being starved of capital. The pension funds offered these firms no help. Even though many of these businesses employ unionized workers at decent wage rates, the managers of pension funds had no inclination to use the resources under their control to try to save workers jobs.

Pension funds have also done little to prevent the top executives of major corporations from raiding the companies they manage to pay themselves salaries far out of line with what executives receive elsewhere in the world. The representatives of shareholders, including pension fund managers, have looked the other way as top corporate executives decided to bless themselves with salaries running into the tens, or even hundreds, of millions of dollars annually. These salaries bear no obvious relationship to performance by any measure. As one of the articles in this book notes, exorbitant executive salaries can be viewed as a tax out of workers' paychecks - the impact is the same, less money for wages.

Alternatively, these salaries can be seen as taking money which rightfully belongs to the shareholders. But, for some reason, the $50 million salaries of CEOs never seem to raise as much ire among investors as the concern that autoworkers or steel workers may be overpaid by $1-$2 and hour.

This book shows both how pension funds have failed workers and also how some innovative managers are trying to use pension fund assets to create good paying jobs. It gives examples of success stories, where pension funds have been invested ways that build communities and also provide high returns. These success stories could provide a model for pension fund management in the future.

Though this book is flawed, the "small" European states are so often neglected it is nice to see someone looking at them.

In this book of collected essays, one gets the feeling and sense of the small and medium sized states of the European Union and those Western European nations that are looking at one day joining the EU.

The book need some work

At the turn of the twentieth century, a Russian general negotiating the Franco-Russian alliance wrote that "when it comes to fighting, when it gets near to it, we want all the diplomats to shut up; they mustn't interfere in any way when we get anywhere near to mobilization; they mustn't try to stop it."

George Kennan is the diplomat who wouldn't shut up. Since that "Long Telegram" he sent from Moscow in February 1946, followed by the famous article on The Sources of Soviet Conduct that he published under the pseudonym "X" in Foreign Affairs in July 1947, he has been an independent voice in foreign policy circles, admonishing the United States government to take a more enlightened course of action in relation to Cold War challenges.

George Kennan spent twenty-six years in the American Foreign Service before moving to academia and teaching history at Princeton. He was ten years old when the First World War erupted, eighty-five in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell down, and he lived to be a centenarian. As he remarked in an acceptance speech, paraphrasing Chekhov, history has been his professional wife, whereas disagreeing publicly with his own government about foreign policy has been his professional mistress. This book is composed of notes and articles he penned in the intercourse with his mistress: even when they address historical issues, such as the last years of the Cold War and the downfall of the Soviet empire, they should not be regarded as historical material, and will be of little use to professional historians.

But Kennan's reflections, spanning the period from 1982 to 1995, can still teach us many lessons. He was a virulent critic of the renewed arms race that put America and the Soviet Union at loggerheads in the mid-1980s. He was highly conscious of the profound scars that the First and Second World Wars had left over participating countries, and was convinced that Western civilization could not survive another such catastrophe, let alone a nuclear engagement. The thought that war planners could envision a nuclear conflict where one side would win over the other filled him with terror and anger. Likewise, chronicling the events of the late 1980s and early 1990s, he strongly rejected the idea that one side had "won" the Cold War: for him, the militarization of American discussion and policy that was promoted by hard-lines circles in the Reagan administration had the countering effect of delaying rather than hastening the disintegration of the socialist block. This may be a point of controversy among historians.

The name of George Kennan is associated with the word and doctrine of containment. This, he explains, is based on a giant misunderstanding. Here is how he sets the record straight: "When, many years ago, I lightheartedly used the word 'containment' in a manner that attracted much attention then and later, what I had in mind was, as many of you know, not a response to a military danger (I saw in fact no such danger), but a response to what I saw as a political danger, flowing from the abnormal conditions that then prevailed in Europe. I did not expect that the need for this sort of 'containment' would last forever. Last of all did it occur to me that it could serve as the rationale for a weapons race of unlimited duration and unprecedented danger." In other words, Kennan envisioned the need to prevent Communists to establish a dominant influence in Western Europe and in Japan, and this was best done through economic development and support provided through the Marshall Plan. As for the doctrine of military containment, he notes in 1985 that "what most needs to be contained is not so much the Soviet Union as the weapons race itself". And he adds, somewhat provocatively, that "the first thing we Americans need to learn to contain is, in some ways, ourselves."

Also controversial are his views on state sovereignty. According to Kennan, the theoretical status of unlimited sovereignty, even as an attribute of the larger and better-qualified states, is becoming more and more unreal and absurd. The rush toward independence and secession has created states that are theoretically sovereign but not self-sustaining or valid by any other criteria. The problem stems from the lack of any suitable intermediary status between complete formal subservience as a minority or administrative unit within a larger state and a total independence an equality with all other states as a member of the universal UN community. Kennan sees membership to the UN as a condition that gives rights but also imposes obligations. States that fall short of these requirements should not be granted equal status. But the inadequacy between institutional order and international challenges is not limited to the UN system: as Kennan notes, "our political system is in many ways poorly designed for the conduct of the foreign policies of a great power aspiring to world leadership."

Although his arguments were developed in a different context, some of his remarks still ring singularly true today: "Just because the leaders of another country do not share our political ideals and do not appear to be nice people, that does not mean that one has to fight a war with them." Or to end with a last quote, "There seems to be a curious American tendency to search, at all times, for a single external center of evil to which all our troubles can be attributed."

George F. Kennan is most widely known as the man who first articulated the policy of containment of communism. In one of the most widely cited articles ever to appear in the magazine "Foreign Affairs", ironically signed by "X", Kennan argued in 1947 that the policy of the United States should be to prevent the spread of communism. No attempt was to be made to roll it back, he believed, and history has proven him correct, that the inherent absurdities of communism would eventually lead to its collapse. However, he never advocated an aggressive military posture, believing that the real struggle was a political one.
This book contains a series of reflections rather than memoirs. Written in the years 1982-1995, they are now somewhat dated, as subsequent events have rendered some of his opinions obsolete. However, his opinions regarding the structure of the Russian heir to the Soviet Union are still very valid. His father was considered the leading American expert on Russia in his time and Kennan followed in his footsteps. Kennan the son also spent a great deal of time in the Soviet Union and his knowledge of how it operated was invaluable. His comments on the true intentions of Stalin at the end of World War II should be taken very seriously and they also point out how simple-minded and naïve American foreign policy often is.
He also argues very strongly for the establishment of a professional Foreign Service division that is independent of political winds. Unfortunately, this is not likely to happen and the current trends are in the opposite direction. It takes decades of accumulated knowledge before you can begin to understand the nature of another country and that can only happen if it is left to professionals. In his reflections, Kennan points out some of the absurdity of the bellicose rhetoric and how both sides in the cold war were often loose with the truth.
One other interesting point is when Kennan cites a mission to the Balkans by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace that took place immediately after the two Balkan wars in 1912-1913. The members of the mission had a difficult time getting around the area, but they were determined and eventually succeeded in conducting an on sight review of the results of the war. Their report mentioned the complete destruction of villages occupied by members of another ethnic group and mass rape as a tool for terror and eviction. In other words the actions that were described as "ethnic cleansing" when they took place in the last decade.
One of the most knowledgeable men in foreign affairs in the twentieth century, Kennan is often overlooked because some of his opinions do not coincide with those who advocated a "tough line" against the Soviets. Whether you agree with him or not, his opinions are well thought out and backed by decades of experience studying and dealing with the Soviets. I strongly recommend this book if you are interested in obtaining expert opinions about the past conduct of American foreign policy.

This book is a bit of an anachronism as the century in question has ended and an entire new set of problems face American foreign policy. George Kennan remains, though, more of a sage than one who can offer practical foreign policy advice. His knowledge of US-Soviet relations remains nearly unparalleled, but it is not really that important any longer.

Kennan writes and speaks with pragmatism, though one does not have to read far into the book to know that he is warning of what he feared would be a US-Soviet military clash if the war hawks of the Reagan administration had their way. Time and again he elaborates on how the Soviet Union is (was) not the enemy. He feared that somehow the seeds he first planted as containment of a political philosophy would spell doom in the military arena.

This book is a collection of speeches, editorials, book reviews, and other public appearances that focuses on the late 1980s and early 1990s. Kennan is nearly a century old, and if the reader goes between the lines one gets the image of a wise old man attempting to spread his message of peace to a world that doesn't seem to hear.

Kennan remains one of the most remarkable figures of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, we no longer live in that time.

In Copper Crucible, Jonathan D. Rosenblum sets out to grind his ax and bash the evil "big business & Corporate giants". Too bad he didn't tell the rest of the story,... As he fell all over himself demonizing Phelps Dodge and raising Union organizers to sainthood, he conveniently omits the fact that a fully loaded beer truck was the drawing card the union used for its strike meetings. Alcohol just set the stage for the violence to come. And beleive me there was plenty & encouraged by the union. "Lets get the miners drunk & they will vote how we say" after all,... its all about power & money -on the union side as well. Copper Crucible may be based on true events, but it certainly does not paint a full true picture.

This history of a bitter Arizona mining strike in 1983-86 is a top-notch case study of how unions were mugged by American corporations in the 1980s. To judge by the endnotes, Rosenblum interviewed every player in the strike -- from Phelps Dodge executives and union leaders to ex-Governor Babbitt and undercover cops -- and the result is a vivid narative that weaves together labor history and political and legal analysis. The sections on pro-management bias at the NLRB and the use of undercover police to spy on strikers are gems of investigative reporting. Rosenblum is pro-union but he presents management's case at length and doesn't hold back from sharp criticism of the United Steelworkers leadership. If you're interested in labor history or labor/management relations in the US, read this book.

This book focuses on the destruction of individuals' lives when they cross paths with a powerful corporation, Phelps Dodge, when that company has the leverage to do so. This book reveals clearly how thin was the veneer of the labor-management accord after WWII. Phelps Dodge saw an opportunity to bust their unions and aided by labor law, labor law officials, and law enforcement departments did so. This book is strongest in its depiction of personalities but is weakest in putting this entire episode in a larger perspective. Rosemblum casts doubt on the unions understandings and strategies in this strike of 1983. But what is missing is any broad attempt to frame this labor conflict in context of the political understandings and power of the American working class in general. Why are the anti-labor biases of labor law officials, judges, and law enforcement officials tolerated in this country? Do most working poeple support these biases? Do they not know that they exist or consider them to be irrelevant? Do they support union-busting? If not, are they powerless to elect pro-worker Congressmen and change labor laws? Union actions and community understandings take place in these unanswered contexts. The book is highly readable but one is left primarily with sympathy for the mostly Chicano workers who had their lives uprooted and not with a broader understanding of labor relations other than the obvious capability of a company with an extreme anti-union animus to carry out its will.

This book is an overview of a very specific area, mainly the history and actions of immigrant Jewish garment workers, who primarily immigrated from the Pale, in great numbers after 1905. Obviously, this is a specialized study and not the sort of thing you would pick up in place of a Danielle Steele novel, but the writing is clear and compelling. One of the main benefits of the book is that although you may have no particular interest in the subject matter, the book is so engagingly written that you learn almost in spite of yourself and have trouble putting the book down.
The book is split into 6 major parts: Jewish Womanhood in Eastern Europe; Remarking the Jewish Family Economy in America; Unwritten Laws: Work and Opportunity in the Garment Industry; The Social and Cultural Dimensions of Work; Women and the Mass Strike Movement; The New Unionism and the New Womanhood.
The book is at its strongest in the earlier and mid sections, when the author relies on a lot of first-hand accounts to create the portrait of what life was like for these women, where they were coming from and what they experienced. The discussions of the actual historical events were a bit more removed from the first-person analysis, and accordingly, less engaging. All in all, a very interesting book, particularly for those interested in understanding what life was like for a substantial portion of immigrants at the turn of last century.

This book is about the growth of the garment workers' unions and the place within that growth that the Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe took. It was well-written, well-researched. Were I a history professor looking for a informative additional text regarding the turn of the Twentieth Century, I believe I would put this book on the top of the list.

Susan Glenn tried her best, but I found it redundant in some places..but it is a must read for jewish studies/labor studies/and Women's studies people. Lot of Info provided with direct accounts

This book was a wonderful reference to me when I was taking my 20th Century Europe Class at the University I attend. Although the information is out of date now that is in it, but the history isn't out of date. We build on history, which is the foundations, so I recommed this book to get a firm foundation on Europe from after the Cold War to the present (1998). THIS BOOK GETS AN A+ IN MY OPINION. Plus it is an easy read and not hard on the eyes or mind.

These books get out of date very fast. However, the background information and analyses of the relationships between countries were very informative. I do think that the copy editor of this book was 'adrift', though. Lots of typos and grammatical errors that even the simplest word processor should have caught. PLUS some glaring factual errors. Not right, especially for a non-fiction book.

For the average American this book will teach you a few things. Unfortunately a lot of the things you learn will be misleading, "americentric", or outright false. Let us not forget, as the first customer/reviewer of the book mentioned, the countless typographical errors, which do not lend themselves to credibility. Overall, the book provided an interesting overview and presents a few issues that are of note, for example, Turkey's desire to join the EU but its lack of "high profile" preventing it from doing so. Also the ongoing problems in Cyprus are described. Unfortunately Newhouse does not provide a thorough analysis of the future/growth of the EU and completely neglects the facts, particularly with the regard to the realities of many Eastern and Central European countries' economic situations. One particularly irritating problem is Newhouse's overemphasis on what the Czech Republic predicts about itself and its future, not relying at all on unbiased fact and "hard numbers". The book depicts Czech Republic as a progressive and dynamic economic reform success story. The number will tell a different story. The economy of the Czech Republic is dismal. This may be lack of research on the author's part or perhaps a question of the material growing outdated, as the previous reviewer stated.

Certainly, read this book if you are interested in the state of European affairs, but read it skeptically and critically.

The book arrived in a timely manner. It was clean and well kept. I appreciate the fast response.

It's a college book, but its good..the only thing is that the laws get updated all the time..so, you should be careful with them.

I can only assume that the vast majority of you ordering this book are for college. I can't imagine anyone ordering it for fun. Basically, its a great college book. Not confusing, in good order and logical.

Paresh Chattopadhyay has written this book in his own subtitle as "an essay in the critique of political economy". In this case, the critique is that of one of the most persistently controversial issues in socialist political economics: the status of the mode of social production in the USSR. Despite all the confusion and the many political and ideological connotations and influences on this matter, Chattopadhyay dissipates the mist of propaganda and counter-propaganda and reveals the USSR as an essentially capitalist society, in all the facets of that term.

As reviewer Byars already explains well, this book demonstrates how any sincere application of Marx' own terminology and criteria for capitalism to the Soviet Union cannot avoid this conclusion. The existence of wage-labor, capitalist competition, capital accumulation, class property and so on are all proven, and equally the position of many Trotskists and the like on the USSR as a "degenerated workers' state" are shown to be empty words.

Chattopadhyay additionally analyzes the structural aspects of the Soviet economy, positing the interesting and well-argued thesis that the Soviet Union accumulated capital entirely along the lines of what Marx describes as the absolute method of accumulation, that is by, given a certain level of technology, expanding production by increasing the working day, the intensity of work, and the amount of workers and means of production employed. This reached its apogee under Stalin, where the 'war economy in peacetime' led to the swiftest industrialization for any single nation the world has ever seen. Nevertheless, this method was not sustainable after the initial phase of primitive accumulation (which always follows this method), and since the Soviet Union was unable to efficiently create or utilize new technologies, it was prevented from using the Western capitalist method of _relative_ capital accumulation. Therefore, Soviet society entered a decades-long crisis of underproduction of consumer goods (or excess effective demand), which led to a combination of decreasing standards of living and increasing political crisis to finally destroy the Soviet system from the inside.

In the process of explaining all this Chattopadhyay engages many of the most prominent writers on the Soviet Union in debate, and he spends a chapter on refuting various versions of the USSR as being "neither socialist nor capitalist". He does all this only on the basis of Marx' terminology, however, and he does not enter into a discussion of whether a revision of this might be useful. He makes very succesful use of Lenin's own words to refute the ideas of many well-meaning Leninists that capitalism was "reintroduced" or "enforced" from Stalin's time on, and of course the Maoist claim that capitalism was "reintroduced" after Stalin can be equally dismissed.

I would add that I have only a few minor criticisms of the book. Paresh Chattopadhyay's grasp of the Marxist conception of capitalism is excellent, and he maintains it against all commentators regardless of their eminence or political importance. Nevertheless, in his discussion with Mandel (p. 134) as well as elsewhere he seems to make himself the mistake to consider anything bought or sold a commodity. Obviously, a commodity is only that which is produced for sale - if a subsistence farmer sells any surplus that happens to have grown because of good weather, this is sold, yet not a commodity. Additionally, it is too bad that Chattopadhyay does not really engage the pertinent question of why the USSR was unable to revert to the relative method of capital accumulation by revolutionizing the technology of production. He only notes that this might require private initiative that would threaten the bureaucracy, which is hardly a very strong explanation.

Overall, this book is an excellent discussion of the Soviet economic system and its mode of production from the standpoint of Marxism, and should be read by all who share that viewpoint.

State capitalism is a complete contradiction in terms.

Capitalism can only exist when the State exerts no influence over the market. It is impossible for a country to be capitalist and have a government that exerts control over the market, for instance via environmental regulation, minimum wage laws, etc etc etc. A government in a capitalist society only performs it's absolutely necessary functions, which is securing individual rights.

This book argues on flawed and falsified concepts and is a complete waste of time.

This is the single best, most complete book written on why the USSR was capitalist, from a rigorous Marxist position.

Without any moralizing, he details both a critical reading of Marx's notion of what constitutes the capital-labor relation and how it developed in the USSR. Chattopadhyay shows how the Russian Revolution became basically a move not from capitalism to communism but from feudalism to capitalism, in part through the role of the Bolsheviks and Leninist ideology in the undermining of the revolution.

Suffice to say, since capitalism is defined via the relationship of capital to labor, he shows how the separation of the producer from the means of producing was reproduced in rigorously capitalist form: how the USSR had a wage labor market, capitalist property (which does not rest on a juridical understanding of private property as personal property), exploitation and so on. An absolute MUST READ.

Combine it with articles from the journal Aufheben, whatever Amadeo Bordiga material you can find, and the work of Raya Dunayevskaya, and you have a pretty excellent grasp of the basic dynamics of state capitalist Russia.

Clearly, once the USSR is seen as capitalist, the rest of the fake socialisms become much clearer as well.

Jacobs' research has been diligent as evidenced by this inspired, spell binding, page turner. He takes the reader inside the American workers' unions and shows how the workers have been taken hostage by the mob. This is a MUST read for anyone who cares about the American worker!

While the book reveals Jacobs knowledge of organized crime, the book does not provide evidence of the real struggles of workers who had benefited through their self-activity. This one sided book shows how the mob infiltrates unions but does not provide significant evidence of worker resistance to criminal activity in unions. The book is therefore more about organized crime and union raccateers rather than organized crime and union organizations. Why are unions singled out as the font of criminal action when so many other organizations are susceptible to mob influence? It is patently false to argue that union members are not interested in the affairs of unions. This argument is the equivalent of saying tht workers don't like unions, when they in fact are the primary forces in forming them. True, some union leaders are corrupt, but today we are finding a resurgence of rank-and-file local leaders who are not corrupt. Though Jacobs contends he is not anti-union, his book is certainly anti-worker. The book provides no adequate prescription for resolving the problem that he sees so endemic to unions. The book suffers from inadequate knowledge of the trajectory of labor history in the U.S. and an obsession with organized crime. Moreover, we cannot equate unions writ large with the broader labor movement that includes organized and unorganized workers.

Like the cliff notes to racketeering, this book submerses the reader in the core aspects of organized crime, how if has afflicated the United States and the history of labor and government's moves to resist it. A truly splendid piece of work by the Warren E Berger professor.

The Teamsters is one of the most notorious unions in the U.S. It is also unusual in that it is one of the few unions where a nationally-organized rank and file movement has fought for and won many progressive changes, in the effort to increase accountability and honest unionism in the union's leadership. This book is about Teamsters for a Democratic Union, the national reform caucus in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. The book covers the background of the group's formation in the early '70s to the eve of the historic first-ever one-person, one-vote election of top union officials in 1991. TDU represents the best in the labor movement, where unionism represents a social movement of working people, unlike many in the labor movement who utilize union power as a vehicle for personal enrichment. Many union officials fear the collective power of the rank and file and those who support that kind of labor movement might not like this book. But TDU has served as the inspiration for unionists in many other organizations and TDU has played a unique role in the American labor movement.

This book must have been written by a company man! Don't waste yout time with this one as it's full of lies..

excellent labor history from a participant in one of the US' best rank and file labor groups.