| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 54

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Dan Clawson, The Next Upsurge: Labor and the New Social Movements (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2003)

MOST CANADIAN trade unionists know just how weak the American labour movement is. We usually respond with concerns about the power it gives employers, along with a kind of smugness, that at least "we" are stronger.

But adversity can force activists to try new and creative strategies — experiments that can become a rich source of strength and renewal. Dan Clawson's book is about efforts in the US to create new ways of doing union work. These include efforts to democratize unions and expand the participation and initiative of rank-and-file members, transform union activity and organizing into more of a mobilizational effort, and, most importantly, build new relationships between unions and sectors of the working class — mostly women and workers of colour — that neoliberal capitalism has brought into the service sector in its aggressive restructuring in the last 25 years. These relationships go beyond merely trying to organize new people into unions: they involve efforts to link up with and create social movements that "fuse" union and community work in new and creative ways.

These strategies potentially contribute to a necessary shift in the paradigm underlying American labour itself. In spite of the Sweeney-era leadership changes in the AFL-CIO and key affiliates, Clawson argues that only such a move away from the New Deal era model of unionism can assure the survival of the US union movement. But this shift can only happen, he argues, as part of a mass upsurge — analogous to previous periods of mass struggle that gave rise to craft unions in the late 19th century, industrial unions in the 1930s, and key social movements, such as civil rights, second-wave feminism, gay and lesbian liberation, and anti-war activities in the 1960s. The new union experiments mentioned in the book are seen as contributing to and serving as harbingers of the kind of social change that can develop through a new upsurge.

Clawson places much of the blame for the sorry state of today's American union movement on its continued reliance on the outdated paradigm established in the 1930s and further modified by the Taft-Hartley Act of the 1940s. Under it, union activity tends towards servicing individual bargaining units through juridical procedures that encourage rank-and-file passivity and reduce the mobilization of members. It reinforces a culture of expertise and staff power and directs unions away from building links with surrounding communities and other key social movements. It relies on the sanctioning and protections of a state regulatory environment. In the present era of corporate aggressiveness and state sponsorship of the neo-liberal agenda, even the safeguards built into the traditional National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) model no longer provide a way for labour to survive, much less grow.

Clawson brings together a rather impressive list of varied experiences from across the union movement, showing some of the exciting efforts to move beyond this paradigm. In the process, he assesses their strengths, and potential to contribute to greater membership and worker participation, militant action, and more lasting and deeper change. Some of the areas he looks at are:

Different organizing strategies.
Ways of building close links between union struggles (for ongoing battles with employers, contract struggles, and organizing) and communities. The AFL-CIO funded multi-union effort to organize minority workers in Stamford, Connecticut, stands out. Organizers built deep community links, and established a movement for affordable housing as part of organizing workers into unions.
Efforts to address the oppression of women, through challenging macho/male paradigms of union leadership and activism.
New kinds of labour struggles that bring together different elements of the working class and allied social movements, into workplace, community, and union-building campaigns.
Forms of union-based international solidarity.

He also suggests that unions need to provide space for workers to talk about their concerns, aggressively engage the media (and do so in a participatory way), and to create a new paradigm for their operation via mass civil disobedience, or ignoring NLRB procedures and organizing independently.

Throughout the book, Clawson identifies some of the contradictions unions face in trying to change themselves. He points out that leadership and strong organizations can stifle workers' self-activity, if workers are not given the space and resources to learn from their own efforts and failures to move forward. While organizing and building outward is key, this must not come at the expense of the union's ability to provide militant leadership for and develop the capacities of the existing membership.

This is an interesting and provocative book, but it also suffers from a number of weaknesses. Clawson makes no reference to building on the political terrain. Nor is there any discussion about how to create political forms to push the new agendas forward in the short or long term. We get no sense of transforming political understanding or fostering political learning. Certainly, workers' experiences in direct struggles with employers and community movements can teach all kinds of political lessons, but where are the political organizational forms to summarize and pull together these lessons?

Even more, there is no discussion about bigger political questions or ideas things like the need for an alternative to neoliberalism, a challenge to the ideology of competitiveness, or a critique of capitalism and the possibility of a different social system. It is difficult to conceive of building a sustained movement to transform unions into democratic, militant, and class-oriented instruments of social change without looking for ways to move beyond what Americans call "liberalism," and the continued ties to the business-dominated Democratic Party.

In Canada (even with a social democratic party), as well as in the US, the lack of political reference points that point beyond capitalism means that most workers accept our dependence on the private market success of employers (or accommodation to the logic of the marketplace in the public sector) as a fixed limitation. This political weakness cripples our ability to make organizational breakthroughs.

The lack of concern with ideology raises all sorts of problems in Clawson's fascinating discussion about the nature of upsurges. His contention that real change in the labour movement requires an upsurge makes a lot of sense. But if you consider upsurges as a series of large waves that social movements can either take advantage of or miss, it is hard to argue that the existence of political reference points that question the social system not critical.

The foundations for the gains of the 1930s were laid by radicals of various stripes. The lack of a strong tradition of a class-based socialist politics was one of the key reasons that the 1960s social upheavals in the US failed to move in the radical directions of the student and worker movements of France and Italy. Surely, when new upsurges happen (and they always do), a lack of political and ideological challenges to US capital from within will limit their intensity, as well as reduce the ability of activist experiments to serve as a potential base for new democratic and participatory alternatives.

There are other problems with this book. Clawson does not deal with the manufacturing sector or the unions there. His disappointing and unimaginative section on globalization inexplicably ignores the exciting anti-capitalist component of the movement, mostly concentrates on the weakest and least effective alternative strategies, and does not identify the enormous challenges that activists face in trying to address the deep wellsprings of pro-imperialist ideology that persist in the US labour movement. His glowing assessment of the Harvard University clerical workers' brand of unionism, and its relationship to management is highly contentious and seems more like wishful than solid thinking.

Overall, this is an interesting and thought-provoking book. Canadian trade unionists would do well to look seriously at and learn from the experiences of our American brothers and sisters in their efforts to rebuild and renew their movement.


Herman Rosenfeld Canadian Auto Workers

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