Fighting for a Living Wage

BOOK REVIEWS

Muirhead, Russel. Just Work. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. 224 pp. $24.95(hardcover).

The clever title of Harvard government professor Russel Muirhead’s bookreflects the tension inherent in the nature of work. On the one hand, there isthe societal pressure on individuals to “just work”—do not complain, do notfight it, just get to work. Work is a necessary evil to support consumption,others, or God. On the other hand, there is the demand of individuals on societyto provide “just work”—work that fulfills principles of justice and respects thedignity of workers as human beings. Just Work therefore tackles the centuries-old issue of the meaning of work: “What should we expect from work? Shouldthe promise of work be restricted to its instrumental value—to the wages itbrings? Is it right to invest work with the deeper promise of fulfillment?” (p. 3).

The powerful and thought-provoking central theme developed in Just Workto address these questions is “fit”—just and meaningful work is work that fits.As a political theorist, Muirhead’s first task is to justify fit rather than freedomas the standard for just work, especially against the backdrop of the liberalmarket ethos of the twenty-first century. The author argues that a liberal polit-ical regime provides freedom while requiring citizens to work. The fact that we must work then necessarily gives legitimacy to questions about the qualityof that work. Furthermore, democracy is premised on self-determination andequality. Work that degrades the human condition or provides rewards to alucky few runs counter to these democratic principles. Fit better than freedomalso captures the common associations between work and human dignity, andalso better recognizes that freedom in the world of work is often imperfect. Thequality of work—fit—is thus a legitimate subject for modern democracies;freedom alone does not suffice as the standard for work. These argumentsprovide the basis not only for a richer conception of just work, but also for rein-troducing the subject of work back into political theory. If justice is simplychoice, then there is nothing special about work in political theory. But if fit

WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society · 1089-7011 · Volume 8 · June 2005 · pp. 507–529© 2005 Immanuel Ness and Blackwell Publishing Inc.

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defines work in a democratic society, work deserves special attention by politi-cal theorists (and politicians).

So what is fit? Muirhead defines fit through two dimensions—social fit andpersonal fit. Social fit captures the extent to which individual abilities matchwhat society needs to be done. Personal fit considers the extent to which workis personally fulfilling. A key contribution of Just Work is exploring the tensionsbetween social fit and personal fit that have characterized visions of work backto at least Plato and Aristotle.

In Plato’s simple city, jobs are all focused on contributing to the commongood. Strong but simple individuals are laborers, smart but weak individuals aremerchants. Social fit is maximized but at the expense of personal fit—what ifsomeone does not want to be a laborer or a merchant? Aristotle, in contrast,elevates the importance of human capacities and by extension personal fit—evenif a job serves the common good, it should not be allowed to stunt an individ-ual’s personal growth. The parallels with the liberal market economy of thetwenty-first century are surprisingly striking. The political system of ancientGreece has been replaced by the invisible hand of the market, but the end resultis the same. Markets are very powerful for channeling individuals and resourcesinto their socially optimal uses, albeit with a narrowly defined construction ofsocial value rooted in consumerism and marginal productivity justice. But whathappens when markets produce sweatshops and assembly lines that degradehuman capabilities? This again is the tension between social fit and personal fit,with personal fit unjustly dominated by the demands of social fit in today’s globaleconomy.

So instead let us structure work to be personally fulfilling. Not so fast, warnsJust Work—a wholesale focus on personal fit is equally problematic as a whole-sale focus on social fit. Muirhead shows how Betty Friedan, by largely ignoringthe realities of the full range of good and bad jobs that society needs completedand by inflating work to be the single source of human fulfillment, raised thestandard of work so high that it was impossible to fulfill. And in her later writ-ings, Friedan abandoned the personal fulfillment element of work and focusedinstead on pay. Just Work therefore advocates a more nuanced middle ground—work should contain elements of both personal and social fit. In other words,what is needed is a balance—consistent with my contentions in Employment witha Human Face: Balancing Efficiency, Equity, and Voice (Cornell University Press,2004). While the competing dimensions will only be partially satisfied, this isbetter and more stable than emphasizing one extreme.

In this way, Just Work provides a reality check for all sides of the employ-ment debate. To the aristocrats of old and the free market advocates of today,the reality check is the issue of personal fit. It is not acceptable to let marketsand political systems structure work solely for the good of others without con-sideration for the human effects on individual workers. To social reformers andother advocates of fulfilling work, the reality check is the issue of social fit. The“stinginess of nature” means that unpleasant jobs will always need to be done.We cannot survive by doing only pleasant tasks that are intellectually stimulat-

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ing and fulfilling. These are very valuable reality checks that we all ignore atour own peril.

What is murky, however, is the extent to which we have to accept the reign-ing vision of social needs instead of reshaping this vision to be more just. Thisis particularly problematic in the area of traditional work standards. Muirheadforcefully focuses personal fit on the nonmaterial aspects of work. In fact, theevolution (or degeneration) of the Protestant work ethic to the current pecu-niary emphasis on work as supporting consumption is roundly criticized forlosing work’s intrinsic purpose. It is unclear then where standards like minimumwages, health insurance, and nondiscrimination emerge—standards that Muirhead admits in passing are also critical for just work. Along these lines, fora book so firmly rooted in the intersection of human dignity, political theory,and the employment relationship, the omission of human rights instrumentsfrom the analysis is also surprising.

Just Work simultaneously reveals the power and the frustration of scholar-ship on work. Scholars from many disciplines work on questions of work. Thiscan be very stimulating as we learn from others with very different perspectives.But with different frames of reference and terminology, communication andcross-fertilization can be difficult. To an industrial relations scholar, Just Work’somission of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, John R. Commons, and others whochampioned the moral element of work and analyzed the importance ofemployee voice and self-actualization misses a rich opportunity for the furtherdevelopment of critical ideas. Yet to an industrial relations scholar, the book’sreliance on Plato, John Stuart Mill, John Rawls, Betty Friedan, and AlasdairMacIntyre is freshly provocative and provides new ways to look at traditionalemployment issues. Just Work is poised to reinsert work back into politicaltheory scholarship, but I hope this future scholarship is increasingly integratedinto other perspectives that study work.

Some readers might also be frustrated by Muirhead’s lack of direct discus-sion of solutions to the dilemmas of work. The disapproval of assembly lines,sweatshops, the hyperflexible workplace, and a lack of living wage is clear, andthe natural next step is to take the author’s framework of personal and social fit,and translate it into action for policy makers, unions, human resources profes-sionals, and other actors. For example, one implication seems to be that unionsshould better promote a balance between social and personal fit. This might beachieved by what I call “employee empowerment unionism” in Employment witha Human Face, in which unions negotiate the parameters and provide supportfor increased individual decision making in the workplace. Many such implica-tions lie just below the surface of Just Work, but drawing them out is not itspurpose. Rather, Just Work is successful at fulfilling a more profound goal byshowing the fundamental importance of personal and social fit for understand-ing the meaning of work in modern democracies.

While well written, Just Work is not an easy read. Nor should it be. Muir-head’s analysis of the tensions—some might say contradictions—inherent in thenature and meaning of work is very thoughtful and realistic. Work is compli-


cated. Freedom can promote fit or restrict it. Personal and social fit both supportand undermine each other. Work should be valued highly so that human dignityis respected, but not so highly that dignity only stems from work. This is notthe place for slogans, rhetoric, or simplistic one-size-fits-all solutions. The persistent reader will be greatly rewarded. Just read Just Work.

John W. Budd is a professor of labor relations at Industrial Relations Center,University of Minnesota, Carlson School of Management. He is author of LaborRelations: Striking a Balance.

Nicholson, Philip Yale. Labor’s Story in the United States. Philadelphia, PA: Temple UniversityPress, 2004. 358 pp. $27.95 (paperback).

Philip Yale Nicholson’s Labor’s Story in the United States weaves a history ofthe American working class from the advent of Europeans on this continent tothe present. Nicholson is a professor of history at Nassau Community Collegeand the author of Who Do We Think We Are? Race and Nation in the ModernWorld. His is an expansive view of working class history including the strugglesof African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, women, and chil-dren, as well as white men of European origin. He goes beyond conventionalnotions of class struggle from the strictly economistic or classical Marxist per-spective. For him, labor’s struggle has been about the extension and broaden-ing of democracy to all, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, or relations to themeans of production. In effect, Nicholson’s history of labor is the story of theevolving dynamics of democracy and equality, and it could serve as a generalhistory of the United States from the bottom-up perspective.

Legal definitions of race established the structures of labor practices in colonial America. Racism was the basis of national law and citizenship. Theplantation system introduced in colonial Virginia during the early seventeenthcentury was adopted from the system established by the English in Ireland.Landowners came to dominate businesses that processed, sold, and transportedtheir products (primarily tobacco and sugar). The sons of these landowners whodid not manage the plantation became lawyers, government officials, merchants,military officers, church leaders, and others who legitimated and protected thisarrangement of wealth and control. It is this interplay of class and race (layeredon gender) that Nicholson portrays so well throughout this work.

Nicholson characterizes the Revolution as a reaction to English mercantileand land policies—a republican and independence struggle on the part of thatminority of the population who were (ironically) recognized as citizens undercolonial law. Despite wartime controls of wages, labor made significant wagegains during the Revolution. This set a pattern of state and labor relations thathas been repeated throughout US history: workers are appeased when the nationis under external threat, which is typically followed by retrenchment when peacereturns. Hamilton and other Federalists defined the privileges of property and

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capital during this early period and anticipated the industrial age with its dis-placement of labor with machinery. Nicholson portrays the dialectical tensionbetween the promise of democracy and the hegemony of capital that is theessence of labor’s story in the United States.

The decades preceding the Civil War witnessed the growing disparities ofsocial and economic wealth between capital and labor. As a result, workers werestarting to develop a rudimentary class consciousness. The notion that humanscould be the property of their masters and husbands came under attack by abo-litionists and feminists. This is the period in which white male workers extendedthe franchise, and thus established the first national craft unions. Labor partieswere formed in Philadelphia and New York in the 1820s. However, with citi-zenship extended to white men came a growing divide within the working classbetween the latter and those dispossessed of even the semblance of rights.Nicholson describes two very different forms of resistance growing out of thisdivide. On the one hand, white male workers started using the power to with-hold their labor while enslaved persons, women and children used more passivestrategies of petty theft, vandalism, arson, and feigned illness.

Nicholson’s “heroic age of labor” witnessed the proliferation of workers’struggles. His vignettes of the Long Strike, the Insurrection of 1877, the Haymarket Riot, the Burlington Railroad strike of 1888, and other acts of resist-ance are vivid portrayals of the collective and personal sacrifices of workingpeople. For example, the Triple Alliance of black and white workers in NewOrleans in 1892, amidst Jim Crow’s vicious backlash to Reconstruction, pre-cipitated one of the most effective general strikes of the nineteenth century. TheTriple Alliance won significant wage and hour demands, but more importantlyexemplified the powerful potential of labor when European American workerswere able to overcome racism. Both the revolutionary possibilities and all toooften tragic consequences of race and labor are explored.

Nicholson represents the Progressive Era and the years leading up to theNew Deal as a time of give-and-take for labor. Progressive Era reforms such asmaritime safety, child labor, workman’s compensation, the eight-hour day, andso on were real legislative victories. In 1915, the United States Commission ofIndustrial Relations report suggested a regime of “industrial democracy” whichNicholson characterizes as “not . . . a bad place to start an international programfor labor in the twenty-first century” (p. 177). These measures convincedSamuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor (AFL) to supportWilson’s war efforts and, in return, the cautious union leader was appointed tothe Council of National Defense. The appeal of nationalism over class is a themeidentified throughout the text.

The inevitable reaction to these wartime accommodations and the strikewaves of 1919–1920 took the form of the Palmer Raids that struck out againstradical working class organizations. At the same time, Ford’s “American Plan”and other forms of corporate paternalism bolstered by a propaganda campaignby the National Association of Manufacturers attempted to convince workersthat an enlightened capitalism would ensure their security. New elements of the


business strategy against labor came from university departments of sociologyand psychology under the rubrics of industrial relations and human resources.

As an introduction to the New Deal, Nicholson asserts that, “. . . [O]rgani-zation and political accomplishments for labor [follow] popular and democraticupheavals” (p. 206). His populist approach rejects the “big man” theory ofhistory. The New Deal reforms were precipitated by mass organizing drivesoften driven by communist and socialist activists. Hunger marches, rent strikes,unemployment councils, and welfare office sit-down demonstrations were coor-dinated by community organizers. Massive outpourings of workplace militancyand union organizing were popularly led with little assistance from the AFLduring the winter of 1932–33. Nicholson points to the sixfold increase in theUnited Mine Workers’ membership in the first year of the New Deal as oneexample of the fruits of the labors of thousands of activists. The Wagner Act,Social Security Act, and other protections enacted between 1933 and 1938 followed as a result.

Nicholson’s narrative of the post-World War II period reflects a growingalienation between union leaders and members. Radicals were expelled fromboth the AFL and the CIO. Union bureaucracies started to mirror the corpo-rations they ostensibly opposed. Union leaders were invited into the corridorsof powers. Such obsequiousness did not come without its rewards. Orderly workstoppages and business-like negotiations resulted in regular wage increases andbenefits. During the 1950s, one in three nonagricultural workers were repre-sented. But the author leaves the reader with nagging questions about the priceof such a limited vision of success. Nicholson doubts the part that unions playedin the growing real incomes of workers in the postwar decades. He credits thegrowth of the military–industrial complex and related foreign adventures withstrong job growth and rising expectations. Organized labor also failed to support(and too often hampered) struggles for civil rights, gender equality, peace andanti-imperialism, national liberation, and other movements dedicated to theexpansion of democracy and justice. This is both the irony and tragedy of labor’sstory.

But Philip Nicholson does not leave us without hope. Workers can and mustbe won back from reactionary appeals to religion, race, ethnicity, jingoism, andmisogyny. Labor’s Story in the United States is balanced, thoroughly supported,and accessible to an undergraduate or popular readership. Equally important, itis written by a scholar who cares about the people whose story he tells.

William Cali is an independent scholar.

Gross, James, ed. Workers’ Rights as Human Rights. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003.272 pp. $35.00 (hardcover).

In 1991 Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon published Rights Talk:The Impoverishment of Political Discourse, an important work on the increasing

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tendency of American society to speak in terms of “individual rights” rather thansocial solidarity. This unique “American rights dialect,” Glendon argued, “pro-motes unrealistic expectations, heightens social conflict, and inhibits dialoguethat might lead toward consensus, accommodation, or at least the discovery ofcommon ground” (p. 14).

This observation should come as no surprise because a “right” is inherentlyabsolute and generally uncompromising. Whether granted by court or legisla-tive body, a legal right is an entitlement that is beyond public debate, presum-ably because it is of core moral importance. Not even the majoritarian principleof democracy—the notion that the will of the majority is the law of the land—may override a legal right. “Rights,” then, are powerful legal concepts impact-ing both individual dignity and the communal welfare.

It is important to recognize that rights presuppose values. Societies estab-lish and legally protect certain rights because they are consonant with deeplyheld values. Rights that do not correspond to enduring values amount to pre-carious legal constructs. American society recognizes a host of civic and moralvalues: principal among them are freedom of religion, freedom of expression,and the right to vote. It is telling that each of these rights is rooted (at least tothe modern mind) in a keen sense of individualism. Americans are historicallyless comfortable with group rights or protections for collective action. In theeighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this was because of the need to forge anational identity of one “American people,” not discrete and potentially factiousgroups of people tied to any one religion or political association thought to beinimical to the new country. In the twentieth century, the ethic of individual-ism was reinvigorated by the West’s ideological battle with Communism and itsapparent subordination of the individual to the state.

This digression on our historically conditioned conception of rights isdirectly relevant to the consideration of labor rights in Workers’ Rights as HumanRights. The very notion of labor rights strikes many as hopelessly anachronis-tic, a throwback to a vanished industrial era. And an entire compilation of essaysarguing that workers’ rights should be considered fundamental human rights?To some this is simply untenable. Americans do not share the same culturalassumptions as the Europeans who are largely responsible for including collec-tive bargaining and other workers’ rights in the human rights paradigm. TheUnited States is a culture of profit, individual initiative, and managerial pre-rogative. It exhibits little affinity for the European model of labor relations, con-ditioned as it is on social solidarity and participatory workplaces. The point is,as Roy J. Adams notes in his essay, that the current “normative milieu” mustchange before the encouragement and protection of labor rights as human rightscan ever reasonably occur in this country. Throughout this discussion, however,we should be mindful of the consequences when we couch labor reform in termsof “rights.” As Glendon reminds us, “rights talk” often inhibits dialogue andimpedes consensus. This has practical effects, particularly when the rights weespouse are essentially group rights, notions that do not always meet withapproval in our society.


Workers’ Rights as Human Rights presents ten essays by academics, clergy-men, and government and International Labour Organization (ILO) officials.Although united by the general theme of labor rights as core human rights, theessays range from occupational health and safety issues to international laborsolidarity, to the role of faith communities in the labor movement. All of theessays bring valuable, and even novel, perspectives on the employment rela-tionship as a neglected area of human rights development. Emily Spieler’s pieceon occupational safety and health, for example, is important, in part, for itsstraightforward challenge to the common belief that the market by itself effi-ciently and effectively resolves issues of the workplace.

James A. Gross, Cornell professor of labor law and editor of the book, pro-vides an excellent overview of the workers’ rights as human rights proposal.Gross reminds us that far from being neutral on collective bargaining andworkers’ freedom of association, in 1935 the National Labor Relations Act(NLRA) boldly established the concept of “industrial democracy.” The NLRAmade the participatory workplace the policy of the U.S. government. “The[NLRA] was a moral choice against servility, a relationship between owner andworker that is incompatible with human rights” (p. 2).

Gross argues that U.S. labor relations law should be assessed according toa human rights standard. Such a standard would require labor relations tocomply with more fundamental human values affecting wages, hours, andworking conditions. As subsequent essays in the book make clear, a human rightsperspective on labor issues compels us to ask deeper questions about how westructure the employment relationship. For example, in the collective bargain-ing context, current American labor policy focuses only on whether workers aregiven the choice to bargain collectively, not whether employees, in fact, have avoice at work. If for whatever reason (even the coercive anti-union tactics of theemployer) employees “choose” not to approve an exclusive bargaining unit, therequirements of the NLRA are deemed satisfied. In other words, employees hadthe opportunity to choose, and they exercised that choice to reject a more coop-erative model of labor relations. A human rights standard would neverthelessaffirm the employees’ need for a more democratic workplace and seek alterna-tive means of worker representation.

In the end, a human rights paradigm returns labor law and policy to themoral realm. By insisting that the issue of workers’ rights is more than a publicpolicy debate about regulated versus free market economies, the human rightsperspective demands a moral justification for our labor policy—and that issomething our current system seems unwilling or unable to make. Yet we shoulddemand such a justification because the values at stake are so vitally human: “theright of workers to associate and participate in workplace decisions that affecttheir lives and livelihoods, their right to physical security and healthful workingconditions, and the right not to be discriminated against, in other words, notto be treated as less than fully human” (p. 22).

Roy J. Adams’ “Voice For All” is a provocative essay on the collective bar-gaining provisions of §7 of the NLRA. Section 7 simultaneously protects

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employees’ right to bargain collectively while also protecting their right torefrain entirely from any form of collective action. Adams places collective bar-gaining within the broader scope of political democracy. “The persistence ofarbitrary authority in industry is an illegitimate vestige of long-discredited non-democratic institutions whose elimination ought to be given top priority” (p. 142). The idea is not revolutionary, yet it is a reality often overlooked bycritics of organizing efforts. Collective bargaining is consonant with the largersocial goal of democratizing institutions generally. Why is it that some of themost ardent supporters of self-determination and political democracy are alsoopponents of industrial democracy?

Adams begins by noting that the ILO defines freedom of association as theright of employers and employees to establish and join organizations of theirown choosing without previous authorization. From this broad conception ofassociation evolves an expansive understanding of “collective bargaining.”Unlike the traditional notion of collective bargaining in American labor law, theILO conceives of it as all negotiations between employers and employees, notjust those between the employer and the recognized bargaining unit. More thansimply a semantic difference, the ILO’s definition ensures that even in theabsence of a trade union per se, workers are still able to engage employers onissues in a meaningful way. “Generically, then, the right to collective bargain-ing means that working people have a fundamental right to co-determine theirconditions of work and to select representatives of their own choosing in orderto negotiate those terms on their behalf” (p. 145).

In sum, the ILO model promotes not the potential, but the actual participa-tion of employees. Whereas American labor policy measures compliance withfreedom of association and collective bargaining rights by whether employeesare provided with a choice to form a union, international labor policy askswhether employees have a voice at work. Employees should not be left with a“union or nothing” predicament. Once it is conceded that workers have a humanright to a participatory workplace, employers and employees are free to affectit in new and creative ways.

Lance Compa’s essay is an enlightening study on how U.S. labor law failsin critical ways to abide by international norms governing freedom of associa-tion. Perhaps most glaringly, the NLRA’s broad guarantees of the rights toorganize, collectively bargain, and strike are denied to millions of statutorilyexcluded categories of workers. And of particular relevance to the way we worktoday, traditional labor law has not adapted to include temporary, or contingent,workers within its protected classes.

Compa also observes that the prohibition against firing or discriminatingagainst workers attempting to unionize is largely unenforced. Lax enforcementof legal protections coupled with a lengthy adjudicative process at the NationalLabor Relations Board leave workers in a vulnerable position. Even the rightto strike, the traditional means for employees to take collective action toimprove conditions, is seriously diluted by an employer’s legal right to perma-nently replace striking workers.


Among Compa’s recommendations are the inclusion of contingent and con-tract workers within the NLRA’s scope, the elimination of statutory exclusionsfrom the NLRA so that all workers have the right to organize, and reversal ofthe permanent replacement doctrine when workers strike. He argues that U.S.commitment to human rights norms is crucial to labor law reform.

Workers’ Rights as Human Rights makes a convincing case for a human rightsstandard as a measure of the American workplace. As with all social justice ini-tiatives, however, our immediate expectations should be practical. Internationalhuman rights norms do not always fare well on the American scene. Whetherit is the death penalty, pre-emptive war doctrine, international criminal courts,or environmental standards, the United States has insisted that its history andposition in the world often renders it incapable of adopting internationalist posi-tions. This is not to say that the book’s thesis is incorrect. Indeed it is difficultto disagree with both its diagnosis and its remedies.

But there is something wistful to suggesting that the United States reformits labor policy to conform to human rights mandates. It cannot be denied thatthere is a powerful strain of individualism running through American society.Individualism is more than just one person’s search for self-sufficiency. It is alsothe underpinning of the profit motive and the force behind the creative processthat drives production in our economy. “Economic man” stands alone, in ourway of thinking—master of his or her own material destiny. If Americans thinkin terms of rights at all, economic rights are high on the list. For some reason,rights are not often thought of as having a social dimension. In the end, sub-stantive reform of labor policy to conform to fundamental human needs is acommunitarian enterprise. It is about us as a society recognizing that the waywe work should spring from who we are and what we value most deeply. It maybe that the language of human rights best describes those values, but to bringit to bear on labor policy will require the articulation of a social way of think-ing that seems forgotten today. Yet if Roy Adams is correct that it is a questionof changing the “normative milieu,” then this book is a step in that direction.

Kevin J. Doyle, an attorney currently clerking for a federal judge in Newark,New Jersey, is a frequent contributor to the book review section.

Gordon, Jennifer. Suburban Sweatshops: The Fight for Immigrant Rights. Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 2005. 384 pp. 27.95 (hardcover).

Long Island is often described as a quaint suburban community made up oftowns and villages populated exclusively by white middle-class families. Tree-lined streets and neighborhood grocery stores, brick churches and schools, andcountless strip centers, each with a pizzeria and a Chinese takeout makes eachtown look identical. A closer examination of this region reveals that it is, in fact,an enormous society made up of over two-and-a-half million people, making itmore populous than seventeen states. Its communities range from agricultural

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villages to working class, and middle-class bedroom communities to wealthycommunities whose homes resemble southern plantations. This is the imagethat was propagated by Abraham Levitt when he created Levittown as a plannedcommunity for the thousands of veterans returning from the Second WorldWar. However, it was not open to all veterans, but rather only white men andtheir families, as the deeds contained covenants forbidding the sale to “non-Caucasians.” Today, Long Island is far more ethnically diverse than it has everbeen. Hispanics now account for 10 percent of the population, made up of bothlong-term residents and recent émigrés hailing from places that include El Salvador, Mexico, and Columbia.

However, the fact a person lives in this “paradise” does not mean that he/sheis sharing in its prosperity. The bulk of Long Island’s economy is drawn fromcommuters who trek each day into Manhattan. Within the suburb itself, themanufacturing industry has virtually disappeared since the end of the Cold War,as it was primarily focused on military industries. The former Grumman plantthat was once a bastion of high technology—having produced fighter jets fromWorld War II through the Vietnam War, as well as the infamous lunar modulethat landed on the moon in 1969—is now a business complex housing tenantsincluding an insurance company and a canned food distribution operation. Thenewspapers’ classified advertisements are now clamoring for applicants in the service and retail industries, as they search for people willing to work forthe low wages they pay. Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, and other large corporationsoffer minimum hourly pay to those willing to labor during the long overnightshifts that people must take in order to survive as the cost of living rises astro-nomically. Still, there is an enormous population that cannot even avail them-selves of these sad jobs.

The title “Suburban Sweatshops” alludes to the workplaces that are occu-pied by the thousands of undocumented laborers of Long Island. Contrary tothe image of a garment factory that this creates in the reader’s mind, most ofthese jobs are either in restaurants, cleaning services, or construction/demoli-tion. Eighty-plus hour weeks without overtime pay, hazardous conditions, andabusive supervisors are several of the many examples of exploitation that thesepeople suffer, compounded by the common problem of not receiving theirsalaries. Legal remedies are often unknown, as government agencies rangingfrom the courts to the state Department of Labor have little interest in pro-tecting the legal rights of the undocumented. In the midst of this Kafkaesqueuniverse, Jennifer Gordon founded the Workplace Project. Located in arundown office building in the Village of Hempstead, a rundown municipalitythat was long ago forgotten by the rest of Nassau County, this institution servesas an epicenter for worker empowerment. Gordon provides a narrative of thegenesis of the center, explaining the choices and strategies that were tried in hereffort to make a significant difference in the lives of these immigrants.

Attempting to organize workers who are in the precarious situation ofseeking labor on a daily basis while living in a country thousands of miles fromhome, where they don’t speak the language and fear potential deportation, is


hardly the dream of a union organizer. Gordon formulated an institution thatwould come to not only offer legal advice to workers, but to help them helpthemselves. Employers who refused an individual his wages would find a groupof people protesting at either their home or company. The participants wouldbe fellow workers from the Workplace Project, as these men and women cameto understand the power of unity. The highlight of Gordon’s tenure was thepassage of the Unpaid Wages Prohibition Act. This piece of legislation wassigned into law in 1997 by the governor of New York with bipartisan support.Its success was due to the ingenious tactic of appealing to otherwise hostilepoliticians who had previously voted for anti-immigrant laws and antiworkerlaws. Here, the state senators and assemblymen met with members of the Work-place Project and other allied organizations, where they were reminded of theirown families’ emigrant roots. They were also presented with hard evidence thatenforcing the payment of at least the minimum wage curtailed unfair competi-tion for their corporate constituencies.

An important aspect of the Workplace Project is its democratic spirit. Participation is encouraged, with members chairing committees and sitting onthe board of directors. This spirit pervades the institution as the workers aretreated as members in the fullest sense, rather than as clients or recipients ofsome magnanimity. Over time, this will bear the fruit of a large number ofleaders who will be able to take this community to a higher level. An exampleof this can be found in a lawsuit that was filed in federal court for the recoveryof over $100,000 in unpaid wages. The case, which was reported in today’s (Feb-ruary 25, 2005) Newsday, was announced at a news conference by CarlosCanales, an alumnus of the Project’s Workers Course and now a professionallabor organizer at his alma mater.

Gordon appears to have some uncertainty of the direction that the Work-place Project has gone since her departure, but this is unfounded. Today, underthe leadership of Nadia Marín-Molina, one of the center’s most successful ven-tures is something called “The Trailer.” In response to a turbulent confronta-tion between some of the residents of Freeport, Long Island and the daylaborers (many, incidentally, who also resided in that village) that congregatedeach morning near the commuter train station in the hope of being hired by acontractor, a remarkable solution was found. The Workplace Project arrangedfor the village to donate an empty lot to Catholic Charities, which in turn pro-vided a trailer in which the men could gather with the benefit of shelter whilepotential employers could have a central location to hire them. Within “TheTrailer,” a committee would be formed to organize the order of who would behired first, as well as to collectively agree on a daily wage.

The uniqueness of the Workplace Project cannot be exaggerated. In an erawhen the Universal Declaration of Human Rights seems to have been discarded,this institution loudly proclaims that everyone has the right to work, both inacceptable conditions and for a proper wage. Jennifer Gordon did not simplyremind people of these facts—she taught people how to demand them andsucceed. Fifty years from now, hopefully these conditions will be ancient history.

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Today, through the auspices of the Workplace Project, immigrant workers inLong Island are making great strides as they are working as a solitary force inthe war against exploitation.

Leonard H. Lubitz, a graduate student at Brooklyn College, is pursuing a Ph.D. in political science. He is recipient of the PSC-CUNY Belle ZellerScholarship award for academic excellence and fifteen years of communityservice and advocacy on behalf of the Chinese community of New York City.

Benson, Herman. Rebels, Reformers, and Racketeers: How Insurgents Transformed the Labor Move-ment. Brooklyn, NY: First Books Library, 2005. 216 pp. $22.50 (paperback).

No history of union democracy could be written without crediting theunique role of Herman Benson, its foremost advocate. Fortunately, Benson’sRebels, Reformers, and Racketeers fills this huge gap in labor history.

Articles in magazines, academic, and legal journals have usually dealt withdissidents locked in battles with their unions, but to this writer’s notice, no pre-vious work has had the scope and depth of Benson’s recently published book.The essential reason for this dearth is simply that no one else has the depth ofknowledge coupled with decades of total personal involvement.

After fourteen years, his Union Democracy in Action, a one-man band publi-cation started in 1958, gave birth almost unassisted to the Association for UnionDemocracy (AUD). AUD’s tiny office, now in Brooklyn, New York, has pro-vided cross-country assistance to uncounted scores of rank-and-file membersseeking legal and tactical advice.

Silenced by Murder

Seven union insurgents murdered for battling for democracy in their unionswere honored at an AUD conference in 1983. Victor Reuther, the United AutoWorkers leader, said that to his recollection, this was the first time that unioninsurgents killed while struggling to reform their unions were ever publiclyhonored. The book’s cover features a photograph of a mural depicting martyredDow Wilson in action.

At the conference, three hundred and fifty attendees stood in silent tributeto the assassinated victims of bloody wars:

• John Acropolis, president of Teamsters Local 456, murdered for fighting themob’s attempt to take over his union.

• Jock Yablonski, leader of mine worker insurgents, by killers who broke intohis house in December 1969 and murdered Yablonski, his wife and hisdaughter. Tony Boyle, president of the United Mine Workers Union, wasconvicted of hiring the three cold-blooded murderers.


• Dow Wilson and Lloyd Green, two Painters Union leaders in the San Francisco Bay Area were shot to death in 1966 after successfully battling forunion reform and exposing fraud by trustees of union insurances funds. BenRasnick, secretary-treasurer of Painters District Council 16, admitted order-ing the killings and was sentenced to life imprisonment.

• Roberto Flott, murdered outside the Longshoremen’s Local 6 union hall inSan Francisco. Flotte led a caucus of white, black and Mexican workers thatposed a potential threat to the leadership’s control.

• In 1982 Gene Viernes and Silme Domingo were murdered right in the hallof ILWU Cannery Local 36 in Seattle. They had recently won an electionas leaders of an insurgent caucus committed to ousting labor racketeers intheir union.

Benson and later AUD were involved closely with Dow Wilson and LloydGreen, the slain California Painters leaders, and later with Jock Yablonski’sbattles for honest elections in the United Miner Workers. John Harold, who later became an AUD board member, was the attorney for the slain JohnAcropolis, local IBT president.

AUD and LMRDA

In 1958, prior to AUD’s existence, an urgent phone call from Chicago cameto Benson on behalf of two International Association of Machinists memberswho were leading the battle to oust crooks in control of Lodge 113. Bensonresponded by organizing a legal fund to protect the rights of active memberMarion Ciepley and shop steward Irwin Rappaport, who had dared to criticizethe corrupt leadership.

Norman Thomas, the respected Socialist leader, alert and indignant at age75, headed a legal fund committee, with Benson as the unpaid publicist. Duringthis protracted struggle for free speech, A.J. Hayes, president of the Interna-tional Association of Machinists (IAM), lowered the boom on dissent by impos-ing a trusteeship over the lodge. Benson pungently notes: “The irony here isthat Hayes, as chairman of the American Federation of Labor and Congress ofIndustrial Organizations (AFL–CIO) Ethical Practices Committee, was chargedwith the duty of rooting out corruption in the AFL-CIO. But as president ofthe IAM, he was about to crush rank and filers who took initiative in rootingout corruption in the machinists’ union.”

Benson’s account of the Ethical Practices Committee chairman’s unethicalbehavior is not without humor: Hayes’ trustee alerted Lodge 113 members thata notorious Communist named Ed Hoc was responsible for leaflets passedoutside a New School luncheon in New York honoring Hayes. The “vicious”leaflets were actually printed by the “Ad Hoc Committee for Ciepley and Rappaport.”

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The Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959 was not yetin effect when Hayes personally ordered the expulsion of both the members andthe arbitrarily imposed trustee. A judge ruled that since Hayes’ expulsions tookplace before LMRDA had been adopted, the labor law did not apply.

The two premature advocates of free speech in union were never reinstated,but their lost battle took on national significances: it demonstrated that public-spirited and pro-labor individuals active outside the labor movement could beorganized and attract public support and sympathy for dissidents fighting forunion democracy.

Brief Rise and Long Fall of Democracy in the Painters Union

From 1967 to 1973, Frajk Schonfel, Secretary-Treasuer of the Painters District Council 9 in New York, mobilized rank-and-file painters to wage anuphill campaign to defeat Martin Rahrback, the corrupt incumbent. In pre-dictable fashion, Rahrback, a former Trotskyist, abandoned ideology to becomethe leader of a bid-rigging scheme for a club of cheating contractors. He col-lected at least $800,000 as his share of bribes from inflated Housing Authoritycontracts. When Rahrback was indicted in 1966, International President Frank Rafferty imposed a trusteeship over DC9 that continued Rahrback in power,but as educational director at a $25.00 per week cut in salary.

Judge Marvin Frankel ended the sham trusteeship and ordered a court-supervised election with U.S. Marshals on the streets and the American Arbitration Association counting the votes: 3,230 for Schonfeld, 2,529 forRahrback. Benson was deeply involved in Schonfeld’s election and continued asex-officio strategist and editor of the union’s newspaper. Although Schonfeldheld the only office directly elected by the members, the old guard businessagents continued their control of most locals and job referrals. Apparently, formany members, “democracy is all luxury, but a job is necessity.”

Schonfeld’s reform administration ended when Jimmy Bishop, head of pow-erful Bridge Painters Local, defeated him in 1973. Bishop’s term in office wascut short when the Lucchese crime family ordered his murder. Bishop’s slayingcame when his Mafia sponsors suspected he was cooperating with D. A. RobertM. Morgenthau’s Labor Racketeering Unit’s investigation of the union.

DC9 has been the subject of decades of investigations and indictmentsbeginning with Manhattan D. A. Thomas E. Dewey in the 1930s, on to D. A.Frank Hogan in the 1960s, and followed more recently by D. A. Robert M. Morgenthau. The Schonfeld period can be viewed as an aberration in thecontext of DC9’s sordid history.

Impact of LMRDA

Adoption of the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act by Congress in 1959 was a breakthrough of historic importance for unionmembers’ right within their unions.


Benson summarizes Title I, the Bill of Rights, “protects basic civil libertiesin unions, free speech, due process in (union) trials, the right to criticize offi-cials, to assemble in caucuses, to publish literature discussing union affairs, tospeak at union meetings, to seek recourse in the courts and before administra-tive agencies without fear of union disciplinary actions.”

Professor Clyde Summers largely wrote this Bill of Rights, after serving onan academic committee assembled by Senator John F. Kennedy, who noted thatSummers was “probably the outstanding authority in the country on union dis-cipline.” A wave of insurgency swept the labor movement after the legislationpassed. Benson describes in detail reformers’ battles for democracy in the MineWorkers, Steel, Painters, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers(IBEW), Teamsters, and many lesser known AUD-aided efforts.

AUD Forces USDOL and Union to Exhume Bill of Rights

AUD has successfully argued in several recent federal court cases that theUnited States Department of Labor (USDOL) must require unions to informtheir members of the existence of the Bill of Rights (LMRDS Section 105).

Major unions argued against the USDOL’s acquiescence, stating that sincethey printed the landmark provisions after LMRDA was passed in 1959, therewas no further need to inform their current members about what they printedonce, usually buried in rarely read or preserved copies of the unions’ journalsover forty years ago. The courts have agreed with the AUD and other democ-racy attorneys that members must be informed in print about their free speech,election, and other basic rights.

The Benighted Building Trades and Construction Industry

In Chapter 10, Benson hammers hard at the building trades, whosemembers are the strong supporters of the AUD. This is not surprising forworkers who have virtually no job security and where the hiring system andtransient nature of work make free expression a risky business. A contractorwilling to take care of a local business agent is free to hire whom he pleases.Normally he must also hire the business agent’s friends and discriminate againstthe union’s critics.

Union hiring halls are the key to advancing members’ rights, including freeexpression, if operated in a fair and open way. Systematic procedure for refer-rals should be printed and distributed to the membership. (Basic: a memberlisted as out of work the longest would be the first referred out to fill a job.)Exclusive hiring halls, now a rarity, would have to be required in collective bar-gaining agreements.

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The Teamster Revolution

The overthrow of the Teamsters’ old guard is chronicled in other books (seeespecially, Collision, Ken Crowe’s informed account of the 1991 IBT election(Scribners, 1993). Teamsters for a Democratic Union, led by Ken Paff, its skill-ful national organizer, was the sine qua non for Ron Carey’s election in the 1990three-way race. Benson stresses that the Justice Department’s decisive inter-vention in 1988 under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act(RICO) set the stage for the historic change in national leadership.

The first time RICO was ever used against labor racketeering was in 1982when the Justice Department filed suit against IBT Local from the filing of thecase until the Federal court-imposed trusteeship was finally lifted in 1999.

Clyde Summers, AUD Board member, was a key prosecution witness at atime when most supporters of a strong and honest labor movement recoiled atthe very thought of government imposing trusteeships on unions.

Ron Carey’s impressive victory over Jimmy Hoffa, Jr. was reversed by a newelection that followed Carey’s expulsion by the Independent Review Board. Acomplicated money-laundering scheme gave funds from the Teamster treasurerto outside friendly organizations that then recycled part of the contributions inCarey’s campaign funds. The new elections sans Carey was won easily by JimmyHoffa, Jr.

The fallen Carey was found not guilty by a Federal Jury that heard the samecharges.

John Sweeney: Insurgent AFL-CIO President

Benson is convinced that “the proliferation of these insurgent movementsthat validated dissent in unions. It was the 1991 Teamster reform victory, whichtipped the balance in the AFL–CIO. Forty years of broad rank-and-file reformactivity provided both the moral legitimacy and the power that made possibleSweeney’s insurgent quest for the AFL–CIO presidency in 1995” (p. 8).

Benson calculates that Tom Donahue would have defeated Sweeney by1,000,000 weighted votes without the support of Ron Carey and his New Team-sters. Earlier victories in the IBT, Miners and Steelworkers clearly pushedSweeney and his allies to run for the federation’s president.

At age 90 Benson concludes his fascinating story with an upbeat exhorta-tion: the leadership should foster democratic procedures and encourage rank-and-file participation in membership meetings and elections. Then pride intheir unions’ internal practices would motivate many of the 16,000,000 tobecome active advocates in the organization of the unorganized.

The labor movement would become again a powerful force for social justicein America. For that, union democracy is the key.

James McNamara is a board member and Research Director of the Associa-tion for Union Democracy. McNamara is a long-time union activist.


Luce, Stephanie. Fighting for a Living Wage. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. 270 pp.$18.95 (paperback).

If Fighting for a Living Wage were simply about grassroots efforts to enforceliving wage laws, it would make a valuable contribution. However, becauseStephanie Luce’s work raises basic questions about what it means for progres-sives to govern, it is a necessary read for anyone hoping to build an effectivemovement for political change.

Luce knows the living wage movement well. In addition to extensive fieldresearch, she draws on years of experience with Professor Robert Pollin pro-viding living wage campaigns reliable estimates of the budgetary, social, and eco-nomic impacts of their proposed ordinances. Her chapters three and fourprovide a nice short and up-to-date summary of the still vibrant movement topass living wage ordinances. By 2005 over one-hundred twenty communitieshad enacted such laws.

The main focus of Luce’s work, however, examines what happens after livingwage ordinances are passed. As her material makes clear, passing a law does notguarantee that employers will respect it. Using a multifaceted rating system,Luce categorizes the implementation experiences of eighty-one cities and coun-ties. Thirty-one have had some kind of moderate to expansive enforcementexperiences compared with forty-two municipalities with narrow efforts. In thelater cases, the city typically notifies employers of the new law and then hopesfor the best. The core of Fighting for a Living Wage is devoted to explaining whatmakes the more aggressive cases different from those that are weaker.

Luce outlines many forces that work against full enforcement of living wagelaws. Because living wage laws challenge the predominant “better business” ide-ology that saturates local government, city staff, mayors, city managers, and evencouncil people who voted for the ordinance may have little motivation for seeingit enforced. Councils that put living wage laws on the books may also passwaivers exempting the very employers activists intended to cover. Even wheninternal support is solid, local governments typically have little resources tomonitor employers or to speak with workers. Luce identifies provisions whichliving wage campaigns can fight for in their ordinance that aid more effectiveenforcement including clear allocation of staff resources and responsibilities, the right of workers to legal action, and strong reporting and monitoring procedures.

The greatest factor in explaining living wage enforcement, however, isactions of grassroots activists. Ironically, campaigns that have to battle moreextensively to pass an ordinance in the first place have a better record of the lawactually being enforced. Even more important, living wage ordinances are bestimplemented when campaigns remain active after their legislative victory. Lucespends three chapters detailing the rich mixture of insider and outsider strate-gies used by campaigns to enforce living wage laws. In Los Angeles, the cam-paign had to push the city to place enforcement responsibility on to staff

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committed to the law, conducted training programs for workers on their rightsunder the ordinance, and went after employers, especially at the airport, whotried to avoid paying a living wage. When faced with legal challenges, Bostonactivists negotiated to save the law and to put in place an advisory committeewith both teeth, and Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now(ACORN) and labor representation. The Baltimore campaign formed the Solidarity Sponsoring Committee as an organization of low-wage workers—many covered by the living wage law. The committee and its supporters wentafter several employers caught not paying a living wage. In Buffalo, the Coali-tion for Economic Justice and Citizen Action (CEJCA) filed a joint lawsuitagainst the city for failing to enforce the living wage ordinance.

These examples only begin to touch on the rich experiences broughttogether in Luce’s work. While campaigns have many tools to push living wageimplementation, Luce argues that the most effective efforts combine insider andoutsider strategies. Getting on advisory boards, securing good implementationprocedures, and developing some form of connections with municipal staff canoffer activists access to crucial information about employers and enforcementwork. Such actions can also help build relationships with employers that maylessen resistance to living wage enforcement. If pursued alone, however, insiderapproaches risk co-opting campaigns into dead-end channels and loweredexpectations. Maintaining an ability to “raise hell” from the outside can helpactivists move a stuck process forward. A grassroots capacity to research andinvestigate employers and to interact directly with workers provides campaignsan independent ability to push for social justice. Maintaining such mobilizationson an ongoing basis, however, is difficult, as is monitoring city contracting andeconomic development activity from the outside.

The notion that social movements need to both maintain their mobilizingcapacity and independence while also institutionalizing policy gains speaks to aprogressive challenge well beyond living wage campaigns. Luce does a good jobof comparing the living wage experience to research on implementation in otherpolicy areas. Ultimately, Fighting for a Living Wage raises the basic question ofwhat does it mean to govern. If progressives elect a majority of endorsed can-didates and can then push to enact appealing legislation, does this mean thatthey have achieved full political power? Luce’s work suggests that they have not.Indeed, from a different angle, Luce gets at one of the central insights of UrbanRegime Theory. According to theorists such as Clarence Stone, in a capitalistsociety, local government alone has neither the authority nor the resources todecisively shape the economic and social well-being of the community. In theabsence of any alternative, even the most progressive office holder will be com-pelled to strike deals with those with the knowledge, resources, and ability toeffect change, that is, big business.

The living wage movement, as with progressive politics generally, challengesthe growth ideology and policies produced by such government-businessregimes. However, to effect real change, progressives have to build their owncapacity to govern. The insider-outsider strategies described by Luce offer


excellent examples of how progressive activists essentially build a counterregime. Ultimately, policy shift takes place on the ground not because progres-sive coalitions can simply threaten elected officials with accountability in futureelections, but also because they can offer a vision and resources for alternativeways of governing. Democracy isn’t simply about electing the top of a bureau-cracy every few years, but redefining government so that the community is partof the governing process and so that business power is not the exclusive path tocommunity success. Not surprisingly, the cases in which Luce finds the mostelaborate and effective enforcement efforts are those such as in Los Angeles,where the living wage campaign emerged as part of a much larger project tobuild power. Building true progressive regional power may be an involved, long-term project, but as Luce shows, its basic elements can be grown in even theseemingly simplest of local reforms.

David Reynolds, Ph.D., is a labor educator in the Labor Studies Center atWayne State University in Detroit. He coordinates the Building RegionalPower Research Project. His latest book is Partnering for Change: Labor and Community Groups Build Coalitions for Economic Justice, M.E. Sharpe, 2004.

Cannistraro, Philip and Gerald Meyer, eds. The Lost World of Italian-American Radicalism. West-port, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2003. 360 pp. $29.95 (paperback).

Italian Americans have been notoriously characterized in popular Americanculture as gangsters, racists, and social conservatives. These one-sided stereo-types have been disturbing and disheartening, especially for those of us on theLeft. The Lost World of Italian-American Radicalism is a collection of narrativesthat provide a much-needed counterbalance to these misleading portrayals. Inthe Introduction, the editors, Philip Cannistraro and Gerald Meyer, declare that“What is at stake is both historical accuracy and Italian American self-perception” (p. 3). We can be grateful to them for bringing to life a past thatmany do not even know existed.

For those who have traveled through the hinterlands of Italian-Americanculture, history, and politics, many of the authors of these narratives will befamiliar. Rudolph J. Vecoli, known for his seminal works on Italian immigra-tion, starts up the volume by showing how the Italian American working class,in the span of a generation between World War I and World War II, grew firstinto a militant class-conscious ethnic group, and then, soon after, became derad-icalized, subject to the forces of Americanization, and “seduced into a consumerculture” where the children of immigrants were embarrassed by the Old Worldways of their parents (p. 64).

Vecoli’s essay sets a tone of uncompromising criticism that is scholarly andinstructive. Though each of the contributors to The Lost World obviously has agreat love for the Italian-American heritage, one of the impressive aspects ofthe volume is that none of them hold back when it comes to honestly portray-

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ing it both in its shining beauty and in its unvarnished disgrace. While it is dif-ficult to capture the breadth and depth of such a collection in a brief review,hopefully a few highlights will convey some of the key themes.

The crucial place of Italian immigrants in the U.S. labor movement isuncovered by Salvatore Salerno as he examines the important but undervaluedrole that they played in the strategies of the Industrial Workers of the World(IWW). Central to Salerno’s argument is that the IWW had transnational roots,as opposed to claims made by some historians that the IWW had, for the mostpart, a homegrown birth. He argues that, during the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries, Italian immigrants played a vital role in building a cultureof struggle that included the whole community. One association, Il GruppoDiritto all’Esistenza, “leaned toward a workers’ union organizational modelbased on anarchist and socialist principles, and syndicalist tactics” (p. 179). Theyhad an “active role” in the founding of the American industrial union move-ment. Feminists who had been part of this association developed written cri-tiques of patriarchy, capitalism, and imperialism, as well as critiques of theChurch and of the family that examined the relationship between these institu-tions and the oppression of women. This community-based organizing, thus,goes well beyond simple bread-and-butter unionism to include a much broadersocial movement-type of unionism that embraces an ethos of justice and equal-ity, such as that embraced by the IWW.

But not all of the radical Italian American participation in American cultureand politics was about labor organizing, feminism, and radical discourse. Noaccount of Italian American radicalism would be complete without a story aboutthe infamous trial and execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti,widely believed to have been framed for the murder of a paymaster and his guardin South Braintree, Massachusetts in April of 1920. Paul Avrich, noted histo-rian and scholar of Anarchism, does not disappoint us in this regard with hissuspenseful account of how Sacco and Vanzetti, mentored by the militant Italiananarchist, Luigi Galleani, got revenge from their graves against Judge Thayer,who had, apparently with some satisfaction, sentenced them to death by elec-tric chair. They also got revenge against others who were involved in their pros-ecution and execution. Avrich describes a series of bombings and attempts onthe lives of several agents of the state, culminating in a bombing that had demol-ished Thayer’s house five years after Sacco and Vanzetti were put to death.However vile and counterproductive we may think of the acts of violence com-mitted by these particular anarchists, it is constructive to understand that forthose who used such violence, their position was that “the greatest bomb throw-ers and murderers were not the isolated rebels driven to desperation, but themilitary resources of every government—the army, militia, police, firing squad,hangman” (Avrich, p. 163).

As with most ideological movements, there were distinct differencesbetween the various groupings that called themselves “anarchists.” Arguably, themost influential of the Italian American anarchists was Carlo Tresca. NunzioPernicone writes about the “war” waged against him by the American follow-


ers of Galleani. In an intriguing account of spies, terrorism, jealousy, and thestruggle for power over the Italian-American anarchist movement, Perniconedraws the lesson that “the factional tendencies inherent in the movement” werereinforced by L’Adunata, the voice of the Galleanisti, and this, in turn, “weak-ened Italian-American anarchism and diminished its contribution to the anti-Fascist resistance” (p. 92).

The depiction of Italian-American bigotry against African Americans isprobably one of the most insidious and damaging of all the cultural traits affixedto Italian Americans. The Lost World does not try to deny the longstanding realityof Italian American prejudice against blacks, but it tries to understand it, to placeit in context, and to show that the image is by no means a universal one, andthat it is more attributable to the Americanization of Italian Americans than tounique qualities that are rooted in their ethnic background. Calvin Winslowdraws out how the issue of “race” complicated labor solidarity on the Brooklynwaterfront. Initially, Italian Americans were considered to be “colored” or non-white. Italian immigrants on the Brooklyn waterfront proved to be a dynamicforce in the longshoremen’s strikes of 1907 and of 1919, the latter being “thelargest waterfront strike in U.S. history” (p. 99). However, though they workedwell with American blacks on the waterfront in the early years, by the 1920s,perhaps so as not to be classified at the bottom of the social order, they adoptedthe racial prejudices of many whites, thereby fitting in better with white American society, such as it existed on the waterfront (p. 102).

What is often lost in the frequent depictions of Italian-American prejudiceis the numerous examples of solidarity between Italian Americans and AfricanAmericans. In an essay celebrating the life of Father James E. Groppi, a Catholicpriest and a Milwaukee civil rights leader in the 1960s, Jackie DiSalvo capturesthe contradictions and absurdities of racial conflict in America, and at the sametime, writes a beautiful account of humanity and solidarity in an urban ghetto.Father Groppi was unique and “extraordinary” in his relationship with the blackcommunity, especially the youth. DiSalvo offers that it was his Italian identity,the discrimination in his youth that he and his family faced in an Irish-dominated Catholic Church, as well as his father’s “deep sense of the dignity ofman,” that allowed him to relate to the “social suffering and ostracism” of theblack poor (pp. 235–36). Father Groppi was arrested over a dozen times whileleading civil rights protests, placed under surveillance by the authorities, andhad numerous threats made against his life. His moral leadership makes his par-ticular story one of the great shining moments in Italian-American radicalhistory.

I have always greatly admired Mario Savio who, in the 1960s, was one ofthe most important leaders of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement at the Uni-versity of California and a leader of the San Francisco Bay Area civil rights strug-gle. His speeches during that period are the stuff of legend on the AmericanLeft. However, to be honest, it never even occurred to me, prior to reading GilFagiani’s confessional homage to Savio, that, like me, Savio was of Sicilian-Italian descent; and, like me, he was raised in the borough of Queens in New

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York, and attended Catholic school there, and, like me, he even went to QueensCollege, City University of New York, at least for a short time. I guess all ofthe vowels in his name should have been a clue for me that he was practicallymy compare, but I just did not notice that part of him. Fagiani tells how he per-sonally relates to Savio’s gradual rediscovery of his Italian heritage, and heargues that Savio’s sense of ethnic alienation may have, like in himself, beenprompted by the widespread conservative image of Italian Americans and by thedominance of the modern Italian-American community by bigoted right wingpolitical interests (p. 248). Fagiani admits that, for him, this sense of ethnicalienation was very powerful, and he found in Savio a figure who allowed himto realize that “maybe I could stop warring within myself and feel good aboutwhat I really was—an Italian American progressive” (p. 250). I read these wordsand I thought, “me, too.” I wondered if my own sense of “ethnic alienation”might have contributed to my inability to see my ethnic connection to MarioSavio, a person for whom I have had so much admiration for such a long time.

In reading The Lost World of Italian-American Radicalism, we might find thatit is not so unfamiliar after all. One cannot help but see parallels to the con-temporary period. In many respects, reading this book gave me an eerie feelingof déjà vu. The growth of the immigrant detention centers and the roundup ofArabs, South Asians, and Muslim immigrants in the United States after 9–11are reminiscent of the infamous “Palmer Raids” and other governmental crack-downs on dissent, mostly directed at immigrants, between 1917 and 1920, andnoted in several of the essays in The Lost World. In the contemporary adapta-tion, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer is played by Attorney General JohnAshcroft, and the notorious Espionage Act of 1917 and Sedition Act of 1918are substituted by the U.S.A. Patriot Act of 2001. As if to complete the paral-lels, we have African-American journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal as the interna-tionally renowned death row inmate convicted of murdering a police officer ina case replete with allegations of a hostile and biased judge, Albert F. Sabo, aswell as credible charges of a frame-up.

For myself, getting lost in The Lost World has proven to be an enlighteningadventure. As Italian Americans became Americanized, they lost more than justa beautiful language and culture, but, more importantly, they lost a memory ofa way of life that, though not without its problems and struggles, has much tooffer us today. This book provides not only a glimpse into our past, but deepinsights into our present, and, thus, hope for our future.

Vincent Tirelli is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at the City Univer-sity of New York Graduate Center. He writes about academic labor organizingand is the author of “The Italian-American Labor Council: Origins, Conflicts,Contributions.”

Documents

Fighting for a Living Wage