Organizing at the intersection of labor and civil rights: A case study of New Haven (original) (raw)
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2024
The U.S. is seeing a wave of unionization as workers unite and levy collective power in labor disputes from universities to auto-plants. In light of this widely documented wave, this research attempts to evaluate labor unions on their effectiveness as a form of resistance to racial capitalism. The epistemological framework of this thesis is rooted in the work of Cedric Robinson, who among other scholars of Marxism, capitalism, and the Black Radical Tradition, have put words to an understanding of our world grounded by its historical path of capitalist expansion, spatialized domination and racialization, and extraction and exploitation in all forms. Through primary, secondary, and media source reviews, this research intends to qualify the strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities of labor unions, contextualizing their victories and downfalls among other forms of historic resistance and collective organization.
Is Organizing Enough? Race, Gender, and Union Culture
2000
[Excerpt] We argue that the quantitative interpretation of Changing to Organize is self-limiting, if not selfdefeating. If unions hope to attract a mass influx of new members, they must first address seriously the internal transformation required to build a labor movement of all working people. The highest priority should be on creating a culture of inclusion. We envision a movement that embraces, attracts, and promotes women, people of color, immigrants, and lesbians and gays. We reach this conclusion in large part based on work with local unions that have endorsed the change to organizing. Although national unions play a central role in establishing the organizing priority and coordinating the organizing efforts, the changes that affect the day-today life of unionism occur at the local level. And the reality is that locals engaged in organizing face a host of substantial internal challenges. To the extent that these challenges relate to the organizing itself, they are well understood and are receiving attention at the national level (for example, the shortage of trained organizers and experienced lead organizers is widely recognized).
Popular discourse and academic scholarship both accent divisions between African American and immigrant workers. These debates most often focus on the question of job competition, positioning African Americans and immigrant workers as a priori adversaries in the labor market. We take a different tack. Drawing upon a case study of hotel workers in Chicago, we identify ways in which workers themselves challenge and bridge these divisions. Specifically, we reveal how union organizing activities, such as diverse committee representation and inclusion of diversity language in contracts, counter notions of intergroup competition in an effort to build common cause that affirms rather than denies differences. We argue that these activities represent political efforts on the part of workers to contest and even reshape the racial and ethnic division of labor, thereby revealing competition as a socially contingent and politically mediated process.
Women's Studies International Forum, 2014
a r t i c l e i n f o s y n o p s i s Available online xxxx This article engages the subject of labor movement 'revitalization' in the United States (U.S.), and considers the integrated challenge of building the representation and leadership base of females of color in labor organizations. The project methodology draws on participant data gathered from the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) Union Summer programa national campaign that brought mostly college student interns to work on campaigns throughout the U.S. beginning in 1996. The author finds that the AFL-CIO was unable to maintain longer-term commitment or 'buy-in' from most activists of color as subsequent labor movement actors. Furthermore, working class females generally, and working class females of color particularly, were very under-represented among those retained as emergent activists. The study highlights the need for strenuous consideration of the racial and gender dynamics entrenched in labor movement culture.
Introduction: Reconnecting Labor and Civil Rights Advocacy
2000
Labor and civil rights movements in the United States share the aspiration of empowering workers to attain economic and social justice in the workplace. From their inception, both movements have articulated goals that link individual dignity and group empowerment, economic access and fair treatment, legal entitlements and political mobilization.! They proceed on the premise that the workplace is a site where vital economic interests and possibilities for self-development come together. Put otherwise, both forms of advocacy strive for a regime that links these concerns to do justice to the workplace as a site for the expression of democratic citizenship. 2 Current economic and political conditions underscore the need to connect advocacy for racial justice with advocacy for economic justice. Unions increasingly face the challenge of representing a diverse workforce under constantly changing economic conditions. 3 Civil rights organizations
Black longshoremen and the fight for equality in an 'anti-racist' union
2020
Abstract: This paper uncovers the contradictions between official 'anti-racist' union principles and local practice by exploring the ways that racism shaped a racially progressive union's politics. Using interview material, it centres on the past and present experiences of African American union members working as longshoremen in southern California. Contrary to accounts that locate racism and the racial division of workers solely as a practice utilised by capital, the author argues that it was the labour union local itself, not capital, that readily relied on racism to undermine Black workers, thereby recreating the very same destructive forces that the International Longshore and Warehouse Union's principles purported to oppose.
Lessons of the Civil Rights Movement for Workers' Rights/Union Organizing
In 1955, African Americans in the South faced seemingly impossible conditions, but a decade later, a mass movement had won impressive victories. If workers and unions hope to achieve fundamental changes, not just incremental advances, they should learn from the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement indicates that workers' rights can be won only if workers launch a mass movement, take risks, engage in direct action, demonstrate an ability to disrupt the normal functioning of society, and maintain that disruption until concessions are won. Political change, legal victories, cultural shifts, and media coverage followed from, and depended on, the success of mass action. Learning from the Civil Rights Movement Imagine a rational analyst in mid-1955 evaluating the situation for African Americans in the South. The "logical" conclusion would be that there was very little Black people themselves could do to change their oppressive conditions. Black people were relegated to the bottom of the economic order, and most were disenfranchised. White people dominated politics, the courts, and media. Segregation-in schools, bathrooms, waiting areas, water fountains-and other practices, created daily humiliations, flooding Black people with messages of inferiority. Even minor "transgressions" of the segregated order might be punished immediately and severely, leaving little space for resistance. Most Black people were unwilling to fight the system openly, and many de facto accepted the label of "inferior." And yet, just a decade later, a mass movement had transformed America, both Black and White consciousness were forever altered, and landmark legal changes had passed Congress. Some fifty years later, workers' rights are widely violated; workers face enormous difficulties if they attempt to organize unions and act collectively. The objective conditions are not nearly as grim as those faced by Black people in the South in 1955, but are daunting nonetheless. Labor laws permit practices, such as captive audience and one-on-one meetings (Bronfenbrenner and Juravich, 1994) that some day may be viewed as people today view the poll tax and Jim Crow ordinances. When those provisions of our labor law that are supposed
CONTESTING THE RACIAL DIVISION OF LABOR FROM BELOW
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 2012
Popular discourse and academic scholarship both accent divisions between African American and immigrant workers. These debates most often focus on the question of job competition, positioning African Americans and immigrant workers as a priori adversaries in the labor market. We take a different tack. Drawing upon a case study of hotel workers in Chicago, we identify ways in which workers themselves challenge and bridge these divisions. Specifically, we reveal how union organizing activities, such as diverse committee representation and inclusion of diversity language in contracts, counter notions of intergroup competition in an effort to build common cause that affirms rather than denies differences. We argue that these activities represent political efforts on the part of workers to contest and even reshape the racial and ethnic division of labor, thereby revealing competition as a socially contingent and politically mediated process.