Portside

Most liberals continue to pay lip service to unions and their importance to the Democratic coalition. But in private, many will tell you that they have little use for them. Julian Zelizer, a Princeton political economist, argues that the marriage between liberalism and organized labor “took a terrible turn starting in the 1970s,” when global competition moved manufacturing jobs from the unionized Northeast and Midwest to the non-union South and, ultimately, abroad.

Many have praised the recent AFL-CIO convention for the delegates' efforts to fundamentally change organized labor's direction and strategy. The hope is that a reinvigorated labor movement will reverse the decline in union power and forge a broad coalition that can effectively fight the rising tide of wealth and income inequality and the growing impoverishment of the working-class. The following article from the AFL-CIO's online blog highlights ten new initiatives.

As the AFL-CIO prepares for its upcoming national convention, the issue of non-traditional workers' organizations looms heavy on the agenda. As so-called alternative labor organizations - a.k.a. "alt-labor" - have multiplied, the question of funding organizations and activities without a traditional negotiated dues check-off system is being debated.

UAW President Bob King, seeking to extend the union's base into auto plants across the South, has endorsed a German-style labor structure for a range of U.S. factories -- not just ones owned by German automakers such as Volkswagen AG but also Detroit Big 3 plants with existing UAW contracts and nonunion assembly plants in the South.

With atmospheric carbon dioxide levels having reached the 400 ppm point - way above the 350 ppm considered to be the upper limit for avoiding environmental catastrophe - organized labor is struggling with the tension between the immediate need for jobs in a crisis-ridden economy and the perils to humanity's future of avoiding the sacrifices required to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The following two articles discuss those tensions from different angles.