Introducing Today’s Labor-Community Coalitions

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WorkingUSA, vol. 6, no. 4, Spring 2003, pp. 49–50.© 2003 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved.ISSN 1089–7011 / 2003 $9.50 + 0.00.

DAVID REYNOLDS is a labor educator at Wayne State University in Detroit. He specializes inliving wage and other labor-community coalitions. His most recent work is Taking the HighRoad: Communities Organize for Economic Change (M.E. Sharpe). The fourth edition of his225 Living Wage organizer handbook is downloadable at www.laborstudies.wayne.edu.

Introducing Today’s Labor-Community CoalitionsDavid Reynolds

IMAGES OF PROTEST AGAINST WAR AND CORPORATE GLOBALIZATION from Se-attle to Washington to New York and elsewhere provide dramaticwindows into the daily and more quiet process of grassroots coa-

lition-building developing across the United States. Corporate restruc-turing has caused suffering for many and made the traditionalstrategies of many groups less effective. However, it has also spurredmuch rethinking that has left a growing number of activists lookingfor ways to join forces with like-minded currents of resistance. Today,different leaders within organized labor have begun to rebuild ties tothe community that had often been left to wither during the postwarboom. Each of our three authors focuses on a single axis of labor-community coalition building. Each was asked to highlight both theemerging potential for cooperation with labor and the obstacles tosuch coalitions. All have ample direct experience in coalitionorganizing.

Fred Rose, author of Coalitions Across the Class Divide, explores thedynamics of emerging partnerships between labor and environmentalgroups. He lays out an excellent theoretical model that reminds us thatany coalition mix involves multiple possibilities. Labor may partnerwith community groups, but either faction may also build ties to em-ployers at the expense of the other. Through concrete examples, Rosesummarizes the rich interaction between environmentalists and unions.

As executive director of the National Interfaith Committee for

COMMUNITY-LABOR ALLIANCES: GUEST EDITOR: DAVID REYNOLDS

Reynolds

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Worker Justice, Kim Bobo draws on years of experience to offer asnapshot into the state of growing partnerships between labor andthe religious community. Today, the committee has sixty chaptersacross the United States.

Steve Kest is executive director of the largest network of low-in-come neighborhood groups in the country—the Association of Com-munity Organizations for Reform Now. In detailing ACORN’s manypartnerships with unions, he highlights the wide variety of ways inwhich unions and community groups can ally. Together the threearticles point to the rich possibilities emerging today—as well as re-mind us of the challenges that need to be overcome.

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