An inspiring model for coalition-building.
A veteran (30-plus years) labor organizer tells the story of the Seattle-Tacoma area’s successful $15-per-hour minimum wage campaign and looks forward to a future revival of the labor movement.
Rosenblum was director of the Service Employees International Union’s campaign to improve the wages and working conditions of its members at the SeaTac airport. Inspired by New York City’s United Food and Commercial Workers campaign for a $15 minimum wage, the SeaTac campaign soon took on characteristics very different from those usually attributed to “the business union model.” The author and his allies adopted a political, coalition-building approach rather than relying on the negotiating services that the union staff provides—or fails to provide—for their worker members. Rosenblum’s idea rested on “three bedrock principles—aim higher, reach wide, build deeper.” The author develops the story of how most of the SeaTac workers were largely part-time and working for contractors, a situation caused by deregulation and the effects of post–9/11 austerity measures from airports and airlines. Many of the airport’s workers were also new immigrants. Few were making a living wage, and many were holding more than one part-time job. Local churches and mosques were providing aid and relief to workers’ families. Eventually, they and community organizers realized the power of banding together: “Sikh taxi drivers marched with Somali cabin cleaners, Ethiopian wheelchair attendants, Mexican and white fuelers, and African skycaps.” The campaign organizers decided to focus on the building of these coalitions in the surrounding community, making the question of living wages a moral and ethical issue for the organizations that provided spiritual shelter for their communities. Their campaign really kicked off when Hertz banned Muslims from praying. Ultimately, the community approach was transformational and led to an electoral ballot initiative and a sharply contested campaign, which established new wage rates and labor laws for the area.
An inspiring model for coalition-building.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8070-9812-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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