| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 57

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Steven Henry Lopez, Reorganizing the Rust Belt: An Inside Study of the American Labor Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press 2004)

IT WAS IRONIC, I thought, that on the morning I sat down to read this book, news broke that the Service Employees International Union [SEIU] had decided to disaffiliate from the AFL-CIO. A "grievous insult" to the labour movement was how AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, himself a former leader of the SEIU, described the decision, adding that it "hurt the hopes of working families for a better life." With 1.8 million members, the SEIU is America's single largest union and had represented almost one-tenth of the AFL-CIO's membership. Whatever else it might mean, the departure of the SEIU, along with the simultaneous departure of the Teamsters, is likely to redirect the foreseeable future of organized labour in America.

I say ironic, for Reorganizing the Rust Belt argues that the SEIU serves as a model for unions to follow as the American economy continues its shift from manufacturing to service-oriented employment. At a time when the national rate of unionization has dropped to 8 per cent, the SEIU has managed to double its own membership in a single decade. "If the labor movement is to rebound," says author Steven Henry Lopez, "its resurgence must be built upon the conviction that organizing is always possible so long as people who work can't afford decent health care, housing, transportation, and leisure. But whether US labor as a whole will manage to translate such a conviction into a series of innovative solutions is not a question that will be answered overnight." (222)

How that question might be answered is the subject of this book. For two years in the late 1990s, sociologist Lopez served as an intern for a local of the SEIU that was trying to organize workers at a nursing home in Pittsburgh. This role as a "participant observer" provided him with insights into both the problems that unions like the SEIU faced in securing members and combating employers, and also the possibilities for success. Central to the latter, and to the book itself, is the notion of "social movement unionism," in which labour issues or grievances are recast as broader social concerns, thereby evoking support from the community in the union's struggle against employers.

Lopez sets out his argument with admirable clarity. Why study a small group of service sector workers in the first place? Because, he argues, manufacturing jobs, the traditional base of American unionism, will continue to disappear in the face of technological substitution and global competition, whereas by their nature service sector jobs enjoy a greater fixity. "Not only do workers in nonmobile sectors have more potential leverage over employers than their counterparts in more footloose industries can muster," argues Lopez, "but the struggles of place-specific service workers have important implications for workers in industries directly subject to capital mobility.... Until the labor movement solidifies and anchors its base in these sectors, it will not have the ability to radically change the context for organizing in manufacturing." (xvii)

Why focus on nursing home workers in particular? Because "they are a prototypical example of the kind of low-wage, postindustrial service employment that is coming to typify Pittsburgh's economy." (xvii) Why Pittsburgh? Precisely because the old steel town affords the chance to view this transition from the old to the new, and to assess how unions are able to adapt to it.

Reorganizing the Rust Belt is divided into three parts. Part I analyses two union organizing campaigns at a Pittsburgh nursing home in 1997 and 1998. The first campaign failed, Lopez argues, largely because workers themselves had negative views of trade unions and because organizers failed to address this problem. "You can make your promises but they don't mean shit to me," one worker tells Lopez in his role as union intern. Just one year later, however, a second campaign succeeded once a change in tactics had been made. By involving rank-and-file volunteers in member-to-member campaigning — visiting the homes of workers, in many cases — organizers managed to overcome negative, stereotypical perceptions of trade unions.

Part II addresses the question of organizational legacies, the fact that union officials themselves are often reluctant to abandon established so-called "business union" ideas and practices in favour of newer, social movement unionism. Unions have to confront the limitations of their existing practices for themselves, if they are to change. Lopez looks at how two SEIU campaigns in 1996 and 1997 demonstrated to union leaders the value of building broader community alliances through social movement unionism. As a result, he concludes, "if unions can successfully deal with workers' lived experience, they can build solidarity ... and if unions can also deal in various ways with the organizational legacies of business unionism, they can mobilize existing rank-and-file workers in struggles that link up workers across multiple work sites and with sympathetic community allies." (154)

This leaves one final question: even if workers can be organized and unions can embrace new tactics, how can they challenge the overwhelming power of corporations in contemporary America? "For social movement unionism to be truly viable," Lopez argues, "it must be able not only to establish but to defend and extend permanent beachheads in hitherto unorganized sectors" (154) With American labour law weighted overwhelmingly in favour of employers — for example, failing to award punitive damages in proven cases of unfair labour practices — Part III turns to the use that newly organized workers are able to make of an inherently unfriendly legal system. Reviewing a statewide fight by SEIU locals against the private health company Megacorp Enterprises in 1995–96, Lopez once again shows that by recasting the conflict as a social, not a labour, issue, the union was able to mobilize public opposition. At the same time, the union encouraged workers to document and report as many health and safety problems as they could discover, with a view to tying up Megacorp in an endless parade of inspections. "We just tried to stay in their faces at all levels," explains one union organizer. "We never wanted them to be able to forget about us." (196) In the end, the union's tactics succeeded, Megacorp agreeing to enter contract negotiations with the SEIU in May 1997. "The experience of the SEIU in the Megacorp struggle," concludes Lopez, "suggests that by thinking about labor-management relations in a new way ... social movement unionism can deploy its forces and its efforts in a highly creative manner." (209)

By any measure, this is an impressive and provocative book. Perhaps Lopez overstates the conceptual distinction between older business unionism and the new social movement unionism. After all, trade unions across North America engaged in community-based activism throughout the 20th century, often supporting and fighting for causes that had little directly to do with the workplace. At the same time, Lopez's claim that any "resurgence" of labour will be fuelled by workers' concerns about "decent health care, housing, transportation, and leisure" is to recast workers as consumers rather than producers, and thus misdirect attention from the root of their own distinct concerns.

That said, Lopez is no doubt right in his closing observation that, "The struggle to reorient American labor ... in pursuit of economic and social justice will be played out over the first few decades of the 21st century." (222) The SEIU's decision to abandon the AFL-CIO has probably accelerated that struggle, and Lopez's book should serve as a valuable reference point in the years ahead.


David Bright Niagara College, Welland

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