BY JONATHAN REES
I spent a couple of days over spring break in New Orleans checking out museums. As is my tendency, I also walked a few blocks away from the French Quarter to visit an independent book store. Baldwin & Co. is great, but that’s a post for another blog. What I want to write about here is the book that I found stacked high right next to where I ordered my coffee.
You may remember Hamilton Nolan from his work on the legendary gossip website, Gawker. I hadn’t realized that since that he had become a full-time labor reporter after his former employer got driven out of business by a vindictive lawsuit. The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor is a short but sprawling book about the modern labor movement. It doesn’t address the academic labor movement directly, but I do think it has a lot of lessons for academics interested in organizing, most notably that we have to think of ourselves more as workers—rather than as educators who stand in any way outside of the capitalist system—if we want to have any success at improving our conditions. I’m not going to try to summarize the whole thing here, but I will quote a few passages that I found particularly inspiring.
Nolan spends a lot of the book talking to workers who are unionized or unionizing despite being in antiunion states, antiunion industries or sometimes both at the same time. One of those states is South Carolina, where just about the only union there with any power is the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA). After summarizing the normal critique about this union’s inefficiency, Nolan writes,
It is better to understand the union as one tiny oasis of power for working people that is able to secure for its members the slice of business proceeds that would, in a just world, be flowing to everyone who works everywhere. They are one small bulwark against the overwhelming ability of global capitalism to extract money that should accrue to workers and redirect that money toward investors. They are a de facto replacement for South Carolina’s utter lack of an adequate social safety net.”
Wouldn’t it be great if most of academia had anything even remotely similar?
A different antiunion stronghold that Nolan focuses upon is West Virginia. Chapter Eight is a long description of an ultimately failed effort to organize a West Virginia restaurant chain called Tudor’s Biscuit World. In this case, one waitress, Cynthia Nicholson, started a major campaign because she was (a) fed up and (b) knew someone in the union movement who she could call for help. As Nolan writes,
There are countless potential union campaigns that never come into being because of the failure of one of the links in this chain of events. The most common, by far, is the simple fact that most people in bad jobs do not decide to take it upon themselves to try to organize a union. Of those who do, many of them do not know how to do it, or, who to even ask. Of those who do manage to get in touch with someone about it, many find that existing unions have little interest in trying to organize a new industry not directly tied to their core membership, so many of those requests like Cynthia’s would just fall through the cracks.”
Yet Nolan notes,
“A single union at a single biscuit restaurant in a single dot on the map can seem like a small thing. Really, though, it’s a big thing: proof that, no matter who or where you are, you can make a union, and it can change your life.”
As someone who briefly worked in the labor movement before I went to graduate school, this kind of book is just irresistible to me. It now sits in a place of honor on my bookshelf, wedged between Shopcraft as Soulcraft and What Do Unions Do?
Contributing editor Jonathan Rees is professor of history at Colorado State University Pueblo.
