Organized Labor at a Crossroads

Shop Floor

If you’re looking for a bright spot in today’s political and social gloom, the union idea seems to be it. Organized labor has rarely been more popular: Gallup reports that 68 percent of Americans approve of labor unions, while another poll found that almost 90 percent of people under the age of 30 view them favorably. Just two years ago, the power of these statistics was put to the test with a series of attention-grabbing strikes and wage increases across the country. But even if we’re in a moment of renewed interest in labor, the unionized proportion of the entire workforce is in decline. How can this trend be reversed? Reviewing two works that analyze organized labor at a crossroads—Eric Blanc’s We Are the Union and the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee’s Unite & Win—Nelson Lichtenstein finds that there is an opening for new modes of organizing. One, called “worker-to-worker” organizing, relies less on union-trained organizers’ slowly mapping and canvassing a workplace and more on workers themselves’ laying those foundations—an approach that is open to “more chaos, more false starts, and more organizational gambits.” Lichtenstein writes that “Blanc is right that worker-to-worker activism is essential,” and notes ways in which this approach might succeed in a new landscape of labor that is more contingent, geographically spread out, and diverse. But he also wonders if the traditional approaches are not needed too: “To win, we will need some combination of labor law reform, pressure on the big corporations from an all-out government offensive, a new set of bold union leaders, and, most important of all, the popular realization that the survival of American democracy requires the existence of a flourishing union movement.” Read “Organized Labor at a Crossroads”

Mythbuster

Laura Poitras has a knack for getting people to tell her things they have never told anyone else—including her latest subject, Seymour Hersh. In his profile for The Nation, Kevin Lozano visits the documentarian before the release of her and Mark Obenhaus’s latest film, Cover-Up, a look at Hersh and his decades working as an investigative journalist. Poitras conceived of the idea twenty years ago, and was turned down every time she asked Hersh until now. By following the rise of Hersh’s career as a journalist, Poitras and Obenhaus also tell the “history of American atrocities.” The first of those atrocities was the massacre at My Lai, and the latest of the atrocities that Cover-Up tackles is the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza, both of which Hersh has relentlessly covered even when some of his peers have not. “Journalism is in crisis,” Poitras tells The Nation. “But one of the things about the film is, it’s hopefully showing that this crisis doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and it’s been happening for a long time.…the heart of the film is to help the audience understand that we have been lied to over and over again by the government, and that we need to be more skeptical.” Read “How Laura Poitras Finds the Truth”