Doug wrote: > Well yeah, but as you may have noticed, they're disappearing. So what to do > about that?
I read carefully -- and sympathize with the content of -- Doug's blog posts. This is the right time to emphasize the inadequacy of the workers' organizations to meet the needs of the times. But I see a fundamental problem in all this. I mean, we all have great ideas about what an ideal union movement would be like. However, and I'll be brutal about it, the people who can really change the unions for good (or create unions anew that bypass the old ones, which would be another approach to make the old unions irrelevant) are the workers at their respective workplaces. And we know the ideological condition of U.S. workers. I am not completely discounting the critiques that Doug, raghu, and others brandish against the unions, and insist that they are necessary and even urgent at this point. But we should be humble about the possible positive impact. Clearly, from the outside, a strong social movement could shake the unions off their wrong ways. And who knows which one of us -- fed up with things -- could trigger such a movement by taking one or another initiative. Now, if I may shift the focus a little: A good bunch of the people on this list are workers, academic workers, economists. There is a union of economists, many of us academic workers, in place -- the Union for Radical Political Economics (urpe.org), a fruit of the 60s. It's not a typical union, in the sense that its main job is not the defense of the rights of economists as workers. The role it has assigned itself is that of promoting radical political economics (and please do not ask me about a precise definition of that thing). But there is nothing that says that URPE should not be in that business or helping others who are more directly involved in it. And this leads to me to the next point: In several workplaces, teachers (e.g. adjunct teachers) are engaged in union organizing. At my college, adjunct teachers just organized a union and are currently negotiating with the administration for better pay, etc. All these are options open to PEN-L members. Now if people here are okay with the plug, I'd like to ask people to join URPE, and to take part in the summer conference in August. Once in URPE, you can try and shift URPE all the way to extreme left. There's much room for people to exhibit their leadership bent. By the way (and this a plug within the plug), Sara Burke and I are organizing a panel on the impact of Occupy on the union/labor movement. It'll be great to have you over. Here's more info on the conference: http://urpe.org/conf/sum/sumprog.html _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
