Economic-union Books

Wendy Goldman's "Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin" is intended as a corrective to many of the common accounts of the Great Terror, the period of Stalinist super-repression in 1937-1938. Many books, of varying quality, have already been written about this episode in history, and Goldman's is not yet another overview. Rather, she analyzes carefully to what extent the Terror can be said to have come from above and to what extent it came from below, and she also discusses the role that the simultaneously introduced campaign for democratic elections in the lower ranks and the workers' unions played in the Terror's unfolding.

Goldman shows quite well that the Terror was entirely within the control of Stalin and his assistants, but that its scope and functioning was not actually an entirely top-down affair. Because Stalin had closed off even the independence of the unions, the workers and lower rank bureaucrats had lost their last avenue for protesting against government decisions as well as local policies, and the terror campaign against oppositionists, real and imaginary, deprived the workers from the possibility of public criticism and debate within the Party as well. The result was that as Stalin increased his campaign against intra-Party opposition to his quite unpopular policies, people could, to have their grievances heard and attention paid to their problems, only resort to speaking in terms of denunciations and accusations of "wrecking", "sabotage", "oppositionism" etc. More and more, both within and without the Party, paranoia grew and accusations were flung back and forth as everyone tried to protect themselves and sometimes others from the possibility of being denounced as a "wrecker" over problems outside their control. This contributed to a sizable extent to the very rapid expansion of the scope of the Terror.

At the same time, Stalin's campaign for the democratization of unions and other lower rank positions destroyed the capacity of lower and middle level bureaucrats to use their power and collaboration with others to escape the impact of the Terror itself: the elections made it impossible for bureaucrats to use appointments to positions as a way to get a reliable group of supporters, and it also led to much infighting and power struggling within the bureaucracy, where everyone tried to accuse each other of structural problems in the heavily dislocated economy. In this way, the democratization campaign (quickly abandoned after 1939), either by accident or design, added to the Terror's impact by making every level of the bureaucracy directly vulnerable to political repression.

The problem with this book however is that it relies for a great deal on many different sources from different factories and workplaces, from which we have NKVD reports of comments overheard, letters sent to higher officials, etc. Goldman uses these consistently to prove her various points, but since we have no idea of how representative any given of these comments, letters, statements, speeches etc. were of public opinion at any given time, and Goldman doesn't tell us, it is all basically anecdotal evidence. It is therefore quite unclear what the value is of the long summaries of anecdotes about the variety of viewpoints expressed by workers and bureaucrats in different situations, and this makes the status of a large part of the book rather uncertain. Moreover, aside from Goldman's point about the Terror not being an entirely top-down undertaking, it is not very clear what she exactly wants to prove to us; instead, we get more of an impression of the atmosphere of those days than a real analysis (except for a small part on economic problems at the beginning, which was in my view far more interesting). And since we don't know what the relative 'weight' of her anecdotes are, we can't even say that it does that well or not.

It's not that Goldman hasn't done much work in this book or that it is not well-written, but it's rather the lack of clarity about both the value and the purpose of the elements in the book that make me give it such a (relatively) low rating. Still, it may be worth reading for people with a very specific interest in Soviet history.

This is not a book for someone who already knows a lot about Uzbekistan. Melvin is a 'nationalities' expert who has no evident background in Uzbek or the Uzbeks, so there is little in the way of in-depth analysis. If you are just looking to get a general review of Uzbekistan, this may be the book for you - at only 123 pages in paperback, it won't take long to get through. It's generally pretty readable, except for the occasional run-on sentance. You also need to beware of some sloppy editing that misidentifies dates and people. The book is primarily about politics, not culture, so if you are looking for something on history, culture, or religion, I suggest that you keep looking.

Not as good as I had hoped. However, I enjoyed the book. The book did bring out some thought I had never considered.

Industrial and Labor Relations Review October, 1993 Vol. 47 ; No. 1 ; Pg. 158


In this thoughtful and sweeping survey, Patricia Sexton, a professor of sociology at New York University, reexamines a question that has fascinated labor historians more than any other namely, why has the United States, in contrast to other industrialized countries, failed to develop strong unions and a labor or socialist party? Sexton's compelling argument is that America's unique conservatism is less the result of the weaknesses of labor than of the "unique corporate power and wealth" in the country and the use of these resources to wage a "uniquely repressive war" on labor and left-of-center politics.

The book contains five parts. In Part 1, Sexton discusses the limitations of other theories that attempt to explain America's conservatism. Part 2 treats the history of repression of labor unions; Part 3, the history of political repression from the Alien and Sedition Acts to McCarthyism, as well as the unique hardships that third parties face in the American political system; Part 4, the subtle mechanisms that have been used against labor from the early welfare capitalism of Rockefeller to the more recent effects of deindustrialization, corporate restructuring, anti-labor consultants, deregulation, privatization, and labor-management cooperation; and Part 5 contains Sexton's argument that the greater repressiveness of American capitalists derives from their exceptional wealth and power, including their domination of the mass media.

The book is based largely on secondary sources, including studies of European, Canadian, and Australian labor. Sexton fortifies her argument at every point with telling comparisons to the histories of labor and capital in other capitalist countries.

I have only one serious reservation about this valuable book. In failing to accord American Communists a legitimate and important place in the history of American labor, and in condemning only the "excesses" of McCarthyism rather than the whole thrust of postwar anti-Communism, the author is as much an example as a critic of America's unique conservatism.

In keeping with their mission of examining economic and political issues and policies, The Century Foundation convened a task force of labor union officials, industrial relations academics, lawyers, businessmen, and others to analyze the "grim" slide of labor unions from representing thirty-five percent of the U.S. workforce a half-century ago to barely fourteen percent at the end of the twentieth century. As might be suspected, the nonpartisanship of the Foundation and the differing perspectives of the task force members resulted in rather limited, even inconsequential, findings as to what direction the labor movement should take to reverse their slide.

This report established the unremarkable finding that unions at sufficient density raise members pay relative to the non-unionized segment, reduce the possibility of extreme pay differentials, increase the rate of health insurance and pension coverage, and tend to increase political participation. Of course, the task force uniformly agreed that unions need to rebound to continue to receive these benefits. One of several side recommendations calls for unions to strategically organize through targeting organizable sectors, to consolidate unions, to promote unions as assets in high-performance workplaces, to ally with their global counterparts, and to raise labor's voice on behalf of all working people. The task force fails to mention that the labor movement has considerably stepped up these efforts over the last few years with quite modest results.

Other members focused on labor laws and their interpretation by courts and the National Labor Relations Board as a major hurdle for unions to overcome to organize new members. The basic labor law of the land permits employers to dominate the process by which workers supposedly are free to choose who will represent them. Under the current legal regime, employers can use both coercive and illegal tactics to prevent the establishment of a union with little concern for punitive measures being taken against them.

But there is no chance that the legal situation will change for unions and working people unless a wholesale transformation occurs in public thinking; there simply will be no political mandate. A task force member, Nelson Lichtenstein, declares that "trade unions will need to engineer a political and cultural breakthrough that sways the hearts and minds of millions and millions of people who today see the unions as irrelevant, or even hostile, to their interests." A "classwide insurgency" will be required.

Lichtenstein also presents a background article on the labor movement since the 1930s. It is clear that through the vehicle of labor unions a sizeable portion of the working class gained substantial economic and political citizenship. But equally clear is the fact that the labor movement facilitated those gains at considerable costs. Labor unions were expected to police their memberships in accordance with the provisions of collective bargaining agreements and to eliminate class-based militancy from within their ranks. In an era of an alleged labor-management accord, the labor movement lost the social and political power necessary to respond to the various forces that became seriously arrayed against them by the mid-1970s. The slide has been continuous since that time. A more complete picture of the slide of unions is available in Lichtenstein's recent book: "State of the Union."

This task force as a whole was unwilling to squarely admit that class warfare has occurred in the U.S. over the last thirty years and that the working class lost and is losing. Organizing a few pockets of workers here and there, coordinating with some foreign labor bodies, and running slick political ads do not constitute a labor turnaround. The working class must adopt stances of militancy, insurgency, and participatory democracy to even think about turning around their situation. But beyond isolated cases of such resolve, there is virtually no evidence that a significant revival is even remotely imminent.

This slim volume examines the intellectual and political role of theories of "ethnogenesis" in nationalist ideology in the USSR and its successor states. The author opens with a lucid account of the general theory of ethnogenesis, as developed in the USSR, and proceeds to a case study involving two ethnic groups, now supposedly distinct, arguing over who is the true heir of posited ancestors. Shnirelman demonstrates that current ethnic movements in the former USSR are incomprehensible without an understanding of their development in the twentieth century.

His Orwellian account of Tatar historiography would be stronger with a longer discussion, but his account is worth reading. If issued as an inexpensive paperback, it would be a nice supplement to undergraduate and graduate classrooms.

Forty authors contribute to this anthology of essays discussing issues such as the gender wage gap, work and family benefits, temporary and part-time work, and female leadership in unions.

The central premise of this book is that a progressive "political-social-economic reversal" is likely to occur in the United States and will be driven by a transformed and advancing labor movement. This contention is made against the fact that the unionization rate of private sector workers in the US has dropped from 39 to 9 percent in the last fifty years. The author's optimism is based on some recent organizing successes and on the possibilities of drawing upon a social movement paradigm. However, it is problematical that the author does little in the way of exploring the ideological or political basis for any such upsurge.

In the 1990s some unions took advantage of the community support systems of "ghettoized" Latinos and blacks doing low-wage service work to apply militant pressure and win labor contracts for such workers as janitors, nursing home attendants, and dry-wall workers, etc. In a different vein, Harvard clerical workers were able to develop a potent solidarity over the course of fifteen painstaking years of developing relationships resulting in a unique and cooperative contract with Harvard University. However, few workers now live in small urban communities where many may work for the same or similar employers. Suburbanization has undermined that key basis of worker solidarity. The focus on immigrant communities and unique organizing situations seems to write off the vast majority of American workers.

The author casts a longing eye on the civil and feminist movements of the past as possible paradigms for a renewed labor movement. But he does not acknowledge the fundamental difference between movements trying to exercise basic political rights and one that is cast as infringing on private property rights, which is exactly how corporations view unionization drives. The Civil Rights movement led to general public pressure to stop the deprivation of basic rights to all citizens. Any number of other movements such as the 1960s anti-war movement, the environmental movement, and more recently the anti-sweatshop movement has successfully illuminated various flaws or hypocrisies in our political and economic systems. However, none of those movements has posed a fundamental challenge to the capitalistic economic system.

In the decades prior to WWI, before the resurgence of labor in the 1930s, sizeable segments of the American working class were well aware that capitalism took away control of their economic destinies. The Knights of Labor, the IWW, and the socialists all contested this loss of control. But their influence had largely disappeared by the late 1920s. It was, in fact, the extreme excesses of capitalism, coupled with the fact of an urbanized working class, which led to the resurgence of labor in 1930s. Despite unemployment rates of 30 percent, the state and economic elites were able to contain discontent by creating a labor relations system whereby unions partnered with management in a social accord where adequate wages and benefits were the quid pro quo for restraining worker activism. The grievance systems found in most bargaining agreements were elementary forms of workplace systems of justice. However, in no sense, did workers achieve democracy within workplaces.

What is to be learned about the labor upsurge of the 1930s? As noted, a sizeable minority of the working class gained mostly material benefits along with some job security. But a majority of the working class was not included in this compact, especially blacks and women. Was there a transformation in the political thought of the working class? At best, this labor upsurge resulted in a short lived, mildly social democratic slant in the larger political system. In the last 30 years the American working class has supported politicians who have constructed a global neoliberal system that has been highly detrimental to their interests.

A key theme in the book is that had the labor movement joined with social movements over the past decades, the economic terrain would now be favorable to workers. But the constituencies and relationship to the remainder of society of unions and single issue movements are sufficiently different to call into question any synergistic joining together. The author continues this theme by calling for a "fusion" of labor with progressive movements. Other than a few isolated instances of labor-community actions and some middle-class college kids smearing egg on the face of some oblivious college administrators, the nature of how this fusion would work is not addressed. Actually, some critics see serious shortcomings in emphasizing the mobilization of close-knit communities in union campaigns, calling it "militancy without democracy." Worker democracy to many is no less than the full participation of workers or elected representatives in most workplace decision making.

This author, like most labor advocates, does not address whether American labor unions effectively serve the interests of the working class. The labor-friendly institutions of European social democracies provide one measuring standard. A combination of labor-influenced political parties, works councils, and active employment policies surpass the minimalist American system. Furthermore, those bodies and structures serve the entire working class and not the small minority found in American unions. European unions operate within the confines of this system.

In addition, labor commentators seldom comment on the political sophistication and participation of the American working class. Given the fact that economic and political elites have generally constructed a political and economic system that immensely benefits them, it is difficult to understand a labor strategy that does not directly and substantially attempt to transform that system. Ad hoc organizing or single issue mobilizations are unlikely to substantially alter the status quo.

The reader is left wondering what is the basis for any sort of progressive upsurge. The forces and thinking for such an upsurge simply do not exist. The labor movement has not in 80 years led a radical challenge to the current economic system that favors the few over the many. Of course, if unemployment ever reaches 30 percent again, there will be an upsurge of some type. But the author's suggestion of an upsurge is not based on that occurring.

The book will not tell you how new forms of organizing will recreate the labor movement. It isn't even clear that the author is able to define what he means by labor movement or that workers matter at all. They are a derivitive force for him, and this book will misinform most students seeking to understand union organizing and the centrality of the working class in any campaign. The examples are shallow. Does one really think that Students Against Sweatshops are the basis for a new labor movement? Do we really think that outside forces will generate new militancy? This book is reminiscent of liberal academics in the last century who found it comfortable to watch from the sidelines--without getting into the fray. One may wonder if this perspective and approach led to the irrelevance of SAWSJ and other organizations seeking to tell workers what's best for them without actually understanding what it's like for us to work on the job. I need a book that does not offer canned strategies but one that will show me that organized labor is willing to support my own organizing on the job. We know how to organize here in Boston and we're not getting help from outside "movements."

This book takes a long-range look at the problem of how to revive the American labor movement. It rejects quick-fix solutions and argues that: (1) Labor movements grow mainly in relatively brief periods of upsurge, as at the beginning of the 20th century and during the 1930s; (2) Upsurges happen in unpredictable ways due to a confluence of factors many of which are beyond the control of labor leaders and organizers; (3) During upsurges, workers develop new forms of solidarity that extend across boundaries of craft, industry, race and sex - often in defiance of official law. So what should labor activists be doing between now and the next upsurge? Most of the book is directed toward answering that question. Clawson analyzes a number of organizing projects and campaigns. He is especially anxious to highlight successes, but does not shy away from criticizing failures. His tone throughout is supportive and respectful - both of professional organizers and worker activists. The book is indispensable for anyone who is sincerely interested in helping to revive the labor movement.

Dr. Clawson, a leading sociologist, has failed to make a convincing case for a revival of the labor movement in the United States. He sees the working class as a secondary force in social movements and does not say how an upsurge will emerge. Clawson lists a litany of familiar cases of labor revitalization, each in themselves are important examples of organizing, but as a whole they don't amount to the basis for a labor revitalization. The only way Clawson sees labor as advancing is through glomming on to new social movements that are appearing today. This revisionist perspective does not provide any historical substantiation for a labor upsurge, despite ample evidence the labor movement became dominant when class conflict had been on the rise. This post-modernist perspective is the most absurd effort to demonstrate how labor will grow by eliminating class conflict from the calculus. More important are other social movements based on race, gender, age, sexual orientation. While the identity movements are important, Clawson, in true post-modernist form, removes the working class from any upsurge. No new case studies that can be found elsewere are provided in this book, nor does Clawson provide a systematic approach to students seeking to understand the enigma of American labor activism and the absence of labor power.

This book is not worth your time. The book's Amazon ranking as of this writing is 374,514 (up from a recent 400,696). This compared with Dunbar's "Inventing Money" at 3,700 (down from a recent 2,600), which has a UBS chapter entitled the "Swiss Connection". Lowenstein's "When Genius Failed" also touched on the UBS relationship with LTCM, and ranks 323. Having read all three, I can safely tell you that the ratio of these rakings is a good indicator of their relative quality. I agree with the previous reviewer. The author seems to have had access to some of the persons involved in the affairs he attempts to describe, but is incapable of developing any real understanding of what actually was going on. The writing is amateurish and fails to offer new facts or any kind of analysis. The book never rises above the level of sensationalist journalism. Wittingly or otherwise, the author clumsily lets some of his interviewees settle personal scores, a feature that rules the book out of the realm of credible writing. This is a missed opportunity as the subject matter offers interesting yet-to-be-analyzed questions and issues. The most obvious ones being the conditions that allowed this story to develop: the internal conditions inside UBS, (for example, questions of corporate governance, the relationships and dynamics of the Swiss managers and UBS' non-Swiss personnel), as well as market conditions. The biggest missing item is of course an analysis of what happened between UBS and LTCM. This is a key piece of evidence against the old UBS management, and it allowed the new-UBS to rid itself of the old patently incompetent old-UBS management. Such matters would have merited the attention of a serious writer and interested readers, but eludes the author who chose to write a People's magazine article. The book lacks credibility at many instances. The author goes to great lengths to trash the equity derivatives group, whose 1997 losses he believes forced the old-UBS to merge with a small rival. No analysis is offered on how other derivatives groups fared during the period, and in particular no discussion is offered of SBC's owns equity derivative losses that seem to have been masterfully hidden from public view. Neither is there any attempt to put the derivatives loss in any perspective in relation to the Bank's size, the previous profits of the group, or to market conditions at the time. Publicly available facts are clearly at odds with the thesis of this book. UBS has conceded that merger negotiations began in earnest in early 1997, long before any derivative problems existed. If the equity derivatives group really did the bank in, why did none of the investigations single any culprits from that group? The fact that many of the equity derivatives professionals at old-UBS were absorbed by the new-UBS and the others left of their own volition, and were readily accepted by major firms, suggest that the author did not really crack the story. We will have to wait for another author, one with insight and facts, to understand this curious episode.

This book shows how some [person] got promoted to the top position of a Swiss Bank. By intense internal politics and taking huge bets some unqualified Swiss banker was able to secure the CEO seat, which inevitably lead to disastrous consequences for the bank. The reasons for the fall of UBS are well explained and is a must for anyone wanting to understand how Switzerland's number one bank ended up merging with Swiss Bank Corporation, a smaller rival that secured all the top management position of the new entity. It seems to me that the other reviews of this book come from UBS employees that were working at the time in the bank divisions that caused the bank to almost fail. If you want to know why they are so bitter, read this book.

This book is marginal at best. Very short, quick read with type large enough for a children's book (probably looking for filler pages to get it past 200). Nothing new for someone who followed it in the popular press as the events were happening.

The book also does a poor job of explaining relevant details surrounding the markets of the time, especially with respect to the inner working of Swiss Bank. The author also fails to examine the exact nature of the losses in the equity division within UBS... maybe his knowledge of derivatives rates right up there with the man responsible for the downfall.

Reed is undoubtedly one of the leading experts in this area. He presented his book in a way that students would find it informative. The discussion about the jurisdiction and choice of law issues on Internet is good supported by rules from different areas. Good research tool.

This is a good book for law beginers, but would be a a thriller bestseller for computer geeks. It focuses so much on the technology involved that it gets way out of focus on the main topic: Internet Law. It does not states the main legal problems of the Internet as such, but keeps redudant on the backbone that keeps the www functioning

This is a good book for law beginers, but would be a a thriller bestseller for computer geeks. It focuses so much on the technology involved that it gets way out of focus on the main topic: Internet Law. It does not states the main legal problems of the Internet as such, but keeps redudant on the backbone that keeps the www functioning