Negotiating the People's Capital

Negotiating the People's Capital

Description

What follows is the second part of an unofficial transcript of an off-the-record conversation among three of the labor movement's leading strategists. (The first installment appeared under the title Strategy for Labor, 22 J. Lab. Res. 569 (2001), and has been updated as Strategy for Labor Revisited, available at http://www.ssrn. com). This second meeting was also convened by C, or "cooperationist," who had been for more than ten years the president of a local union, part of a major industrial union, representing 3,000 employees who had been hired to staff a new manufacturing plant in a Southern town ("Newplant"). Newplant had been widely touted as a breakthrough in U.S. labor-management relations because it was consciously designed to promote greater participation of production and maintenance workers in business decisions and a "partnership" role for union officials alongside traditional management officials. In bitterly contested local elections last year, C was voted out of office and now serves in a staff capacity at the AFL-CIO. A, or "adversarialist," perhaps surprisingly a longstanding friend of C, is the research director of another industrial union. A was very active in the Students for A Democratic Society in the 1960s, and after graduating from Oberlin College began his career as a labor organizer, working for a succession of unions that had been active in the McGovern-Kucinich wing of the Democratic Party. S, or "stay the course," is the highly respected chief of staff for a national union representing government workers. [Section headings and parenthetical references are supplied by the editor and do not appear in the original transcript.]

Source Publication

The Challenge for Collective Bargaining: Proceedings of the New York University 65th Annual Conference on Labor

Source Editors/Authors

Michael Z. Green

Publication Date

2013

Negotiating the People's Capital

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