A Collective Bargain

Starred review from November 4, 2019
Labor activist McAlevey (Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell)) delivers a persuasive argument that the power of “strong, democratic” trade unions can fix many of America’s social problems this timely cri de coeur. Sketching the history of the labor movement from the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which guaranteed the right to collective bargaining; through the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which banned sympathy strikes, legalized corporate campaigns against unionization, and created “right-to-work” laws; and the “union-busting effects of globalization” beginning in the 1970s, McAlevey contends that the weakening of private- and public-sector unions over the past 80 years is directly responsible for increased income and political inequality. Yet unions can be successful even in a diminished state, McAlevey notes, pointing to recent strikes in the education, health-care, and hospitality industries that led to improved contracts. She offers a useful primer on how labor organizing works, and effectively refutes common assumptions about unions, including that they discriminate against women and are inherently corrupt. Well-run unions, she contends, can achieve better schools, stronger environmental protections, and increased racial and gender equality. McAlevey’s caustic humor (“We don’t need robots to care for the aging population. We need the rich to pay their taxes”) and contagious confidence in the efficacy of organized labor give this succinct volume an outsize impact.

November 1, 2019
A battle cry for union rights in a time hostile to labor organizations. Longtime union organizer McAlevey (Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement, 2012) is nothing if not a tough talker; her first chapter closes with the provocative phrase, "As the Parkland youth say, I call bullshit." The objection is to the prevailing narratives about unions and the causes of their decline--the notion, say, that unions are immaterial in an age of robotics and globalism or the charge that unions are racist, sexist, and corrupt. "Of course," writes the author, "some unions are sexist for the same reasons that they are racist: union formation is a product of a sexist society." She adds that women and people of color fare better economically with unions than without them. Even as she points out some inconvenient truths about certain elements of unions and the tactic of striking, she ably demonstrates how there is nothing quite like a strike to get the juices flowing, as when the 20,000 teachers of West Virginia recently went out on strike and, in the end, emerged with higher pay not just for themselves, but also for 14,000 nonteaching staff--and, still more, gave "the state police, roads workers, and everyone else on the state payroll a raise those workers could not have won because they did not strike." Union busting is a big business, she writes, because unions are the capitalist's greatest fear: Whole Foods may appear fresh and organic, but its methods in this regard would please John D. Rockefeller, and even the Democratic Party, she writes, has cast its lot with the enemies of their base: "When it comes to public education and teachers' unions, Democrats don't look much different from red-state Republicans." Tough talk for tough times and a welcome guide for labor activists.

COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

December 1, 2019

Labor activist McAlevey (No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age) pairs her urgent, impassioned account of the current state of labor unions with her optimistic recipe for their future success. She bluntly contrasts the sad state of unions at the end of the 20th century with two earlier periods of growth when they gained support from not only workers but also government acting to foster union membership. Focusing on both public and private sector unions, McAlevey identifies factors that caused the decline of unions. While she places much blame on the changing economic and political climate that allowed the rise of fierce employer resistance, she also faults unions for failing to recognize the need for a new militancy and organizational tactics. The author's remedies take the form of several case studies of successful labor organization in recent decades, which she attributes to willingness to merge the cause of labor organization with efforts to address gender and racial harassment and inequality, wealth disparity, and other current challenges facing society. VERDICT This book will appeal to readers seeking inspiration to address problems facing both organized labor and individual workers.--Charles K. Piehl, Minnesota State Univ., Mankato

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 1, 2019
Longtime union activist McAlevey, whose Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell) was named the most valuable book of 2012 by The Nation, essentially reintroduces the idea that labor unions can be a corrective?as they were in the years following the Great Depression?to the yawning economic disparity between the corporate superrich and those underpaid, underserved workers who helped create that wealth. She ties that disparity to what she sees as the foundering of the democratic electoral process, and begins by presenting three cases?those of healthcare workers in Pennsylvania, teachers in West Virginia, and hotel housekeepers in California?in which striking workers not only scored economic successes for their unions but also laid bare serious management wrongdoing before the general public. She follows with an account of corporate efforts to diminish, if not abolish altogether, the union movement over the past 70 years, following with a robust, point-by-point rebuttal of presumptions the public might wrongly hold about unions: that they're compulsory, exclusive to blue-collar workers, racist, sexist, anti-environment, and corrupt. After calling out Silicon Valley, with all its progressive veneer, for its anti-labor actions, McAlevey finishes with keen insights into creating a union and rebuilding a union from within. Another most-valuable book from McAlevey.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)