Economic-union Books

When the union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun;
Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one,
But the union makes us strong.

This old labor hymn was written by Ralph Chaplin way back in 1915 and is the unofficial anthem of the US labor movement. It's sung at labor rallies and gatherings, but with an interesting twist. Organizers often pass out songsheets because many of the assembled labor activists don't know the words.

It's a sobering and even embarrassing moment for the US labor movement which is now down to about 8% of the private sector workers. Those who romanticize organized labor based on college history classes or nostalgic folksong fests need to remember that solidarity always begins with a hope....not a certainty.

And if solidarity ends in even a small partial victory, you can bet there will have been lot of hard work, hard feelings and heartaches along the way to that ecstatic moment when the victory celebrations begin.

Suzan Erem and E. Paul Durrenberger have put together a book that tells how solidarity really works and that yes, the words that Ralph Chaplin penned can become a reality even to those of us who can't remember the lyrics without a songsheet.The book is the product of years of research and writing from a team that consists of a former union organizer and an anthropologist . You couldn't ask for a better combo.­

January 19, 2000 was a bad night for the City of Charleston S.C. and the Port through which so much of it economy depends. What had been planned as a routine picket of a ship being unloaded by a non-union crew escalated into a bloody melee involving hundreds of mostly Black dockworkers and mostly white police. Even though some of the picketers were white, no one doubted that there was an ugly racial component to the behavior of the cops. It's a wonder no one was killed.

South Carolina has a long violent racial history that stretches back to the earliest slave days and many Black South Carolinians had to die before the chains of slavery and later Jim Crow were finally cast off. Although modern South Carolina likes to pretend that its days of white supremacy are over, its citizens know better.

The authors of On the Global Waterfront describe in detail what happened that January evening. Later, local police and union officials both concluded that the confrontation had simply gotten out of hand. Some workers apologized to the police the next morning for the rocks and railroad ties they had thrown. For their part, the local police wanted to settle the whole thing as simple cases of trespass. Police behavior that night was far from exemplary and their provocations and brutality had been fully recorded on video.

City officialdom wanted the whole incident disposed of quickly and quietly so as not give the city a reputation for being "troubled". Troubled ports repulsed rather than attracted the kind of shipping business that the Charleston economy had come to depend upon.

But this was a new Millennium and the realities of a globalized economy made it impossible for Charleston to quietly bury that violent evening.

The 5 men who were charged with serious felony offenses as a result of the riot become the focal point of a complex international struggle that involved competing US dockworker unions, an international network of dockworker militants who saw Charleston as an opening salvo against dockworkers everywhere, a politically ambitious rightwing Christian fundamentalist politician, competing interests among the shipping owners themselves and an expensive legal battle that managed to cross oceans before being resolved.

It would have been easy to lose readers in this bewildering story, but Suzan Erem and E. Paul Durrenberger manage to tell it without resorting to facile oversimplification. One comes away with a special appreciation for ILA Local 1422 President Ken Riley who led his local through the entire struggle with an intelligence and grace under fire that was key to their eventual victory.

Ken Riley's union was the East Coast based International Longshoremen's Association(ILA), an organization with a tainted history of corruption and gangsterism that had endeared them to the worst of the brutal shipping company owners. Ken Riley represented a new generation of dockworker leaders, people who wanted to clean up the union and adopt a militant stance toward the pressures of the new globalized economy. The oldline leadership of the ILA hated Ken Riley and everything he stood for. It would take many months before the national ILA leadership lifted a pinky finger to help Local 1422.

Fortunately, the West Coast based International Longshore and Warehouse Union(ILWU) had a much different tradition that had grown out of the bloody 1934 San Francisco General Strike. Their leadership evolved from the leftwing movements of the 1930's and their legendary former leader Harry Bridges had been accused of being a communist, not a Mafia thug. Their tradition was one of labor solidarity and alliances with social movements for peace and civil rights.

The modern ILWU leadership grasped immediately the importance of Charleston. If the international shipping industry could break ILA Local 1422 and the port of Charleston went non-union, the results could be catastrophic for dock workers everywhere. The ILWU immediately contacted Ken Riley and offered him the kind of money and international contacts he needed to save not only the 5 workers facing serious charges but his very union local.

On the Global Waterfront takes the reader step by step on how another kind of globalization was evolving, the globalization of the labor movement. As Charleston 5 defense committees sprang up and the creaky wheels of the AFL-CIO leadership began to turn in favor of ILA Local 1422, the authors make it clear that all of this was the result of long exhausting hours of work done by a core of very smart and very committed people with the support of thousands around the world.

When victory for the Charleston 5 and Local 1422 finally came in March of 2002 it was a time for joyful celebration. It also became a time of deep reflection as labor activists around the planet pondered their next move in a globalized economy when money crossed borders at light speed and the economies of entire nations were dwarfed by the largest global corporations

Global capital by its very nature seeks to cheapen the price of labor to increase its profits. To do this it must maintain efficient production while fighting to keep workers as disunited and divided as possible. But efficient modern production is difficult with a dispirited demoralized labor force, so the more far-seeing multinational corporate owners see a place for compromise with the global labor movement. This is not compromise based on any sort of moral values or sense of justice, but a cold calculation of power relationships.

It's class war. But even in war, enemies sign treaties and ceasefires while they anxiously assess what the capabilties of their adversaries might be when the peace is finally broken again.

The last chapter of On the Global Waterfront is called "Not Just Another Labor Story". The authors aren't kidding. It's easy to say,"Think globally, but act locally". But what are we exactly supposed to think about? And what actions are we supposed to take?

The morning after that bad night of violence in Charleston SC, Ken Riley and the other Local 1422 activists did not have immediate answers to those questions. But with their own formidable inner resources and the help of others around the world, they came up with some pretty good answers later on. How they did it is an organizers textbook for anyone concerned about social justice.

What Ken Riley and the members of ILA Local 1422 discovered when they took their campaign on the road was that there really is a solidarity community out there and it is truly global. We don't hear about it much from our corporate-owned media (surprise.....surprise), but it's real, it's growing and we here in the USA really need to take our place in this global community.

Whether you are a union militant, a feminist, an environmentalist, an anti-racist organizer, a peace advocate, a combination of all these things or any kind of social activist at all, it really is Global Solidarity Time.

Living in the world capital of individualistic dog-eat-dog cat-eat-mouse economics, solidarity is not something we are taught in school, inherit as part of our common culture or learn about on "Reality TV". It's going to take some effort, but the Ken Riley's of the world are patiently waiting to teach us all about it.

In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold,
Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold.
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old
For the union makes us strong.

This compelling account of the fight to stop decimation of the labor movement by global corporations working in league with the racist anti-labor government of South Carolina may well be the best written and best researched book of its genre. The captivating story pits longshoremen's union local president Ken Riley against South Carolina Attorney General Charley Condon in a David vs. Goliath battle that will have you staying up late to finish the book. The skills of anthropologist Durrenberger and journalist Erem merge seamlessly to produce a tour de force that tells the story of labor action on the waterfront in Charleston before expanding globally to give the reader a clear understanding of how the religious right, neoconfederate southern racists, neoconservatives, and globalizing corporations are teaming up to crush and impoverish workers everywhere by criminalizing dissent while themselves disregarding law and propriety. In the process, the reader is treated to a course on the labor movement more concise and useful than any college semester on the subject. The high global stakes in what would appear on the surface to be an isolated local labor strike are clearly laid out, leaving the reader with an understanding of the threat we all face from the globalization juggernaut. If you only read one book on labor or globalization, this must be it.

Ahead of its time, this book predicted the shape of things to come. The regulatory framework for electronic commerce has largely been plotted along the lines presented in this book back in 1997. Some missing elements are likely to become reality soon, as a result of Web 2.0 technologies. Great buy.

The emergence of electronic procurement, the UN/CEFACT BCP model and XML based transactions, have brought open EDI back into the monitor of e-business developments.

The stakes are high for those legislations that have not sufficiently embodied electronic means of B2B transactions. To those that have, though the challenges are ahead of them, since there have been no functional examples of legally binding on line negotiation models as yet that could facilitate true automated B2B transactions over open networks.

This book presents a superb overview of a subject matter that is here to stay and reviews potential solutions.

This is a good reference tool for Union Organizers, a bit outdated, but a lot of the info is still current. So I would definatly recommend this book!

This is another labor community insider book directed toward labor union leaders and their strategists and written by the same. The motivation is the reversal of the sagging fortunes of labor unions. Many of the articles focus on the need for grassroots activity by existing union members and community supporters. Several union campaigns utilizing members are examined in detail. Union support organizations such as the Garment Women Justice Center are described. Serveral articles examine subtleties of the motivations of non-unionists to vote for a union. An interesting observation is that white collar and technical workers are turned off by the potential for conflict when joining a union, which is interesting in light of the fact that unions have always relied on confrontation as their tool of last resort. The main point of the editors is that union tactics and actions make a large difference in organizing success. The second point is that unions must remake themselves into organizing bodies and avail themselves of the wisdom contained in these articles. But for non-union insiders reading this book, many chinks appear when looking at the articles in totality. For example, one article shows that belonging to two community organiztions lowers the desire to join a union, yet many articles tout labor-community coalitions. In one case where community connections were leveraged to the fullest to win a union contract, it is admitted that may have been a one-time occurrence. A large and confusing point that leaps out from these articles is, just what is a union. Is it a centralized business that collects fees from subsidiaries, demands adherence to policies from the CEO, and provides services? Or is a union a legally recognized association of workers at a locale that affiliates with a national body but retains sovereignty? Statements that workers "are" the union hide more than they reveal. If workers are the union, can they insist that national unions remain committed to a servicing model? If workers are the union, how can some national unions literally require local unions to focus on recruitment? Claiming that workers are the union can be a demotivator for joining a union. After all, it is workers who have unsuccessfully dealt with employers on their own that want to join unions; now they want support, not abandonment. The editors and authors may complain that this book is not about "what is a union," but is only about subtle strategy. If so, they need to put a "Nonunionists need not read" label on the cover. Actually the book is worth reading by all interested in the situation of labor not only on its educational merits but also for the questions that it can engender for non-insiders. Who knows, maybe their next book can be "What is a Union."

This book investigates the politics, global political-economy stakes in the Caspian Sea region. The book is a collection of articles to inform the reader about the significance of this trans-national resource which has the potential to change the economic, political and social ventures in central Eurasia. The book tracks the roots and development of the recent global interest in the Caspian Sea oil and pipelines. At the beginning of the new millennium Caspian energy resources have assumed increased geopolitical importance. Once fully exported to world markets, flows of large volumes of Caspian oil through non-OPEC lands may erode the power of OPEC, and therefore politically and militarily supported by the only super power of this century- the USA. This is an excellent survey of the geo-politics of the Caspian oil, painstakingly researched, tightly structured, and elegantly presented.

At the end of the Cold War, Eurasia emerged as the world's axial supercontinent. The lure of enormous reserves in the Caspian Sea region has made the region the focus of fierce competition between multinationals and the powerful states. This book is about this important geo-economic struggle and provides an essential background to understand the recent conflict in the region, from Afghanistan to Iraq. This is the context in which one should be talking about emerging forms of political and economic control, military control and a forceful push for the US-led globalisation. This book is an essential reading on this increasingly important topic.

John Hicks wrote this, the original classic, of the populist movement. It is easy to read and flows smoothly from page to page. It is very thorough and is the most in-depth book I know of about the Farmers' Alliance. An excellent history! Begin with this classic, then read Goodwyn and McMath and you will have all you ever need on the history of the Populist movement! A must have!

Though little more than a label today, Populism once stood for something specific - a movement of farmers and workers pushing for political and economic change in Gilded Age America. Published over seventy years ago, John Hicks' book remains one of the seminal works on the history of this movement, tracing its origins and following it through to its demise at the end of the century.

One of the keys to understanding the Populists as Hicks sees it is in understanding the role that the American frontier played in America during the late nineteenth century. It was to this vaguely defined, constantly changing area west of the Mississippi that thousands of farmers flocked, setting up farms in the upper and central Midwest. Lured by the massive advertising campaign of the railroads and local promoters, these people came in search of cheap, bountiful land that could be purchased with easy credit.

This massive spurt of growth came to an end with the crop failures of 1887. As the rains disappeared and the land dried up, the price of real estate dropped precipitously. The effects were felt not just in the Midwest, where tens of thousands fled the region, but the South as well. Here, the region was still recovering from the aftermath of the Civil War, with many farmers working as tenants under the crop-lien system, which gave merchants a powerful hold over them. Their resentment of the system added to that of their counterparts in the Midwest, who felt victimized by the economic system. For many, their crops never brought in enough revenue to meet their needs, and blame was increasingly directed at the banks, railroads, and grain elevator operators which seemed to be profiting exorbitantly from their misery.

These farmers sought organization as a solution to their problems. The Farmers' Alliance, a loose organization initially founded in the 1870s, grew as members sought to protect themselves from their economic situation by organizing business cooperatives and pushing to use the power of the government to address their concerns. Though tactics differed - some organized independent political movements, while others sought to take over the dominant political structure from within - by 1890 the separate Midwestern and Southern branches of the Farmer's Alliance were actively involved in politics, enjoying successes that emboldened their membership.

Initially the Alliance sought enactment of a complex "subtreasury" plan of government-managed cooperatives designed to alleviate the farmers' plight, but the constant political obstruction resulted in frustration. Faced with the combined opposition of both the Democratic and Republican parties, many members sought to overcome it by forming a party of their own - the Populist Party. This new party put forward James B. Weaver as presidential candidate, wining six states in the Electoral College and scoring a number of victories in down-ballot races across the country. The depression created by the Panic of 1893 led the party to adopt the "free silver cause," only to be undercut by the Democrats' nomination of William Jennings Bryan in the 1896 presidential election. Though signaling the demise of the party, Hicks argues that the Democrats' adoption of many of the Populists' ideas was proof of the ultimate success of the Populist revolt.

Even today Hicks' argument for the origins of Populism must be taken into account when studying the movement. Using the wealth of publications that the Alliance and the Populists produced, as well as other primary and secondary sources, he makes a persuasive case for the importance of the economic background to the movement, one that remains generally accepted today. As such, this book continues to be required reading for any student of American history, though one that needs to be balanced with more current scholarship on the subject.

This is an excellent and thorough essay on media accuracy. Unfortunately its dust jacket does a massive disservice to it by suggesting that it's just a bunch of funny corrections. This book deserves a lot more attention than that!

This is a book that should be read by anyone involved in media production and anyone who is ever written about by the media. Unfortunately, the dust jacket might scare off serious people. The subhead "How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press and Imperil Free Speech" makes it sound like the book is about media bashing. And the excerpts on the back cover contain mostly humorous corrections (such as one from Oregon, "A headline on Page One should have made clear that Oregon Health and Science University will be studying the effects of meth, not cooking it").

Ho, ho, chuckle, but ... the book's appearance makes it come off like either a collection of humorous excerpts or yet another book that bashes the media for being liberal or conservative or whatever. But that's not what the book is.

In fact, this book is thoughtful and nuanced about the history and consequences and explanations of media error. If you pair it with The Vanishing Newspaper by Meyer, you have a real glimpse of the media, warts and all, that my generation sure could have used when we all had visions of Woodward and Bernstein dancing in our heads way back when.

Sure, reporters will find the book painful to read. They'll worry what their sources think, and sources may be too quick to chortle at the humanity of media production. Yet this paragraph from page 59 is an example of the author's mastery of the subject and leads to some conclusions that both reporters and sources can agree on:

"Working under deadlines causes errors, as do the technologies used by reporters every day; and the newspaper system whereby a story goes from a reporter to an editor and onward until it reaches the page-layout and printing stage is rife with weaknesses and opportunities for error. Yet any blame is laid solely at the feet of the person seen as being directly responsible - to the complete exclusion of the process that contributed to the error. Every stage in the production of a newspaper, broadcast, or other news product is designed with some controls to prevent error, and yet each of these stages also has the ability to introduce or even force errors..."

This book will improve anyone's understanding of how the media really works, or doesn't work, at times.

THIS IS AN IMPORTANT BOOK. VERY GLAD THAT I PURCHASED IT.
GOOD CONDITION.

MARK S. KOSLOSKY

What I appreciated most about Heyward Isham's Russia's Fate Through Russian Eyes: Voices of the New Generation was its appealingly fresh tone. Russia-watchers like myself are continually frustrated by Western representations and misrepresentations of this fascinating, nuanced nation.

According to many reports, one would think that all Russians were vodka-swilling philosophers, world-weary sex goddesses, or gold-chained criminals. Obviously, these elements are present in Russian life, as indeed they are elsewhere, but the sheer complexity of this country is glossed over when the West reduces its understanding of Russians to simple categories and tired stereotypes.

What Heyward Isham has managed to do so beautifully in this anthology is allow the contributors to discuss their own lives in their own words. In doing so, he blows the tired stereotype of the "passive, lazy Russian" to smithereens.

I don't know if I've ever read as eloquent and evocative an essay as Olga Lobyzeva's discussion of Russia's Far North. It reads like a love affair. Theater director Vladimir Mirzoev provides a fascinating dialogue on the state of art in the New Russia the likes of which I've never seen anywhere, either. Frankly, some of the pieces on tax reform and labor laws left me a bit cold, but just listen to Nadezhda Azhgikhina talk about feminism, gender roles, and the media representation of women in Russia today! Why isn't this woman an internationally renowned figure? Why isn't Ms. magazine profiling her? Why isn't she teaching college courses at home and abroad?

In short, I learned from this book as I've seldom learned from any source on Russia. Letting Russians speak to an international audience in their own words is such a simple idea -- but who else has done this? I recommend this book highly to Russophiles like myself, as well as anyone with a natural curiosity as to how people in other parts of the world are living, struggling, working, and dreaming.

Comparatively little is known about Russia's economic mobilization during World War I. However, it was a rapidly expanding Russian economy that spurred a slower growing Germany to a 'preventive' war in 1914 - the longer Germany waited the more uneven the contest would be in economic terms. Apparently, no one either in Germany or Russia bothered to look at a map - almost all of Russia's imports and exports passed through either the Dardanelles or the Baltic, both of which were easily closed. And when these were closed by Turkey and Germany, Russia's international trade (and military imports) quickly evaporated and their economic problems really began.

Peter Gatrell, the author, organizes the book into 11 chapters covering: military administration, educated society and volunteer economic organizations, soldiers/workers/peasants/refugees, tsarist rule, the lack of industrial coordination, financing, food shortages, pogroms and discrimination, the Provisional Gov't, social collapse, and a final accounting. Gatrell concludes that the collapse of Tsarist gov't (compared to other belligerent nations which didn't experience revolution) was that ordinary Russians had no legitimate way to voice their protests, institute reforms, and participate more meaningfully in gov't. The result was the February and then the October Revolutions.

This is one of the very few books written about economic mobilization during WWI, and the only one I have found exclusively about the Russian experience. (About half of Gatrell's huge list of sources come from little-used Russian-language documents.) The book is well-organized, easy to read, and certainly well-documented. Suggestions I would make for Gatrell's future work include a detailed investigation of the Russians' seriously flawed railway management and its affects on the economy and any discussion of economic contigency planning by the Tsarist gov't in the event the Baltic and Dardanelles were closed to them for importing/exporting.

An excellent source for Russia's economic involvement in WWI!

The usual treatment given to the Russians in regard to their actions during World War I has been one of two choices. On the one hand there was the seemingly minor inconvenience (to the Germans) of the Battle of Tannenberg which took some divisions from France. On the other hand was the impact on Russia itself as a precursor to the revolution a few years later.

In this book the author, an expert on Russian history, has written an excellent history of the actions of the Russians during the war. This includes not only the military campaigns but the impact on the Russian citizens, both the elite and the plebeian. Like the rest of the world, Russian industry was mobilized to dramatically increase production. In Tsarist Russia this was somewhat less effective than in other places like the United States. Likewise Russia had problems in feeding themselves.

These situations seem to have started the problems that remained with the Soviet Union for generations to come. This is a book that points out the beginnings of recent history as we have come to know it.

"Some Degree of Power" is a close examination of primary sources from the American revolutionary printing trade, and is the first coherent attempt to create a database of the active, political American working class. The project antedates Sean Wilentz's "Chants Democratic", and undertakes a larger mission.

Dr Lause recovers, from their own voices, the political life and discourse of the radical printing elite of the Atlantic Enlightenment. This book tracks the employment, political associations, publications, military and revolutionary activity of almost one thousand printers from the eighteenth into nineteenth century.

He demonstrates that workers were articulate, organised and made their own significant contributions to civic culture and political events, other than as "the crowd in history." It is evident from this work that printers were the literate and organising elite among workers in the eighteenth century as weavers and masons were in medieval work forces. This corrects the concept of worker as "tool of the bourgeoisie, and follows the interpretive tradition of E.P.Thompson.

If you want to know what early American printers read,wrote, and believed, and what they did as citizens, this is your portal into their world.

...Some Degree of Power is a detailed study and an enlightening look at printers and their many plights and subsequent importance in the early history of The United States. The meticulous care and lengthy detail that have gone into the book, as well as copious research, make it a must-read for those interested in broadening their perspective of early American history. The author, Lause, seems to be a true patriot in the American Colonial sense, and not a detractor of America. Lause's sources reflect top-notch research and no errors of substance can be found.

Michael Honey does a fantastic job in explaining the CIO's contribution to the Struggle for Civil Rights. The Left-Led CIO Unions, most of all FTA Local 19, prepared a cadre of African-American working class leaders in Memphis, who were, in fact, the precursors to those of the 1960s. A must for anyone interested in the study of the Labor role in Civil Rights History in Memphis and the South in the 1930s-1950s.

Can't understand how this country works if you don't see how racism has been used, especially to divide workers. Honey writes about a pivotal time in American history when the working class was organizing and had the potential to transform the South for workers and African-Americans. The lessons are no less true today. A must read for organizers of any persuasion.