Reorganizing the Rust Belt: An Inside Study of the American Labor Movement

by Steven Lopez, Steve López

This gripping insider's look at the contemporary American trade union movement shows that reports of organized labor's death are premature. In this eloquent and erudite narrative, Steven Henry Lopez demonstrates how, despite a hostile legal environment and the punitive anti-unionism of U.S. employers, a few unions have organized hundreds of thousands of low-wage service workers in the past few years. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has been at the forefront of this effort, in the process pioneering innovative strategies of grassroots mobilization and protest. In a powerful ethnography that captures the voices of those involved in SEIU nursing-home organizing in western Pennsylvania, Lopez illustrates how post-industrial, low-wage workers are providing the backbone for a reinvigorated labor movement across the country.

Reorganizing the Rust Belt argues that the key to the success of social movement unionism lies in its ability to confront a series of dilemmas rooted in the history of American labor relations. Lopez shows how the union's ability to devise creative solutions―rather than the adoption of specific tactics―makes the difference between success and failure.

Genres: Nonfiction

316 pages, Paperback

First published April 5, 2004

Reviews

[Andy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lopez's book examines the successes and failures of the SEIU local unions in organizing nursing home employees in Pennsylvania during the 1990s. This was a time when many U.S. towns, such as Pittsburgh, once famous for steel and heavy industrial production had undergone massive economic restructuring under the onslaught of globalization in the 1980s. The deindustrialization of Pittsburgh and elsewhere, along with the demise of unionized, high-wage manufacturing employment, gave way to dead-end service jobs of which healthcare provision forms a part. According to Lopez, it was in this context of rising labor market precarity and the weakening of organized labor nationwide that a new generation of grassroots activists began organizing rank-and-file workers to resist the casualization of service employment. This process of mobilization, however, was fraught with tremendous difficulties posed by myriad social forces. Not only were government officials collaborating with businesses to contract out public services and flexiblize labor markets in the name of efficiency and competitiveness; even union locals and rank-and-file workers themselves remained wedded to the business union model--top-down servicing unionism--that had largely been unable to reverse the tide of deunionization across the United States. The new model of "social movement unionism" that the SEIU advocated thus confronted many hurdles from the onset. Transforming the predisposition or hostility toward business unionism among the rank-and-file became a key task for the SEIU to implement grassroots organizing strategies. Throughout the monograph, Lopez documents how each success of the SEIU in unionizing workers built on past successes and failures. But the most innovative of the SEIU's labor movement tactics, apart from its bottom-up internal organizing approach, was its reliance on community organizing and political campaigning to form key alliances against capital. In doing so, the SEIU marked a fundamental departure from the old-style labor movement as represented by the AFL-CIO.

Theoretically, Lopez contests the political process and resource mobilization approaches in social movement theory for failing to account for the importance of social movement strategies and tactics in surmounting important structural hurdles to mobilization. While agreeing that broad political opportunity structures do set important limits to the labor movement and may dampen movement activity in some circumstances, Lopez argues that both mainstream scholarly views nonetheless underestimate the role of movement actors themselves in subverting powerful social forces. Although Lopez offers a fresh, insider perspective to understanding social movement unionism, there are epistemological issues that he has raised but not fully addressed. The book relies heavily on an ethnographic "insider" (indigeneous) standpoint almost to the exclusion of his professional relationship to the scholarly community. The lack of theoretical finesse and methodological reflection--the key shortcomings of this book in my opinion--is probably due to Lopez's intense political commitment to the social movement to which he devoted his organizing efforts as an SEIU intern. While striking a balance between one's professional and political commitments is incredibly challenging (for me and many others), I would have appreciated Lopez to more reflexive and explicit about the strengths and limitations of his epistemological standpoint early on. A good starting point would be to compare what Burawoy terms the differences between "positive" and "reflexive" social science. Lopez's methodological appendix, in my opinion, does not sufficiently address these difficult questions.