Organized Labor: What Next?

The article focuses on the organized labor in the U.S. Taking care of business belongs to a long tradition of literature that has castigated the U.S. labor movement even as it has hailed the enduring virtue of the U.S. working class. Dating at least back to Richard Boyer and Herbert Morais's Labor's "Untold Story Strike," and James Green's "World of the Worker," partisans of working-class radicalism have contradistinguished the inherent decency and potential radicalism of working people, on the one hand, and the conservatism and cynicism of the real, existing labor movement on the other. Paul Buhle's contribution to this genre is a kind of scholarly polemic-scholarly because it rests on broad acquaintance with the academic literature relating to its subject, a polemic because it marshals its evidence without much regard for nuance on behalf of a rousing agenda of popular struggle. Despite this long, doleful record, those seeking historical sustenance for progressive labor activism do nonetheless have a rich tradition on which to draw. Radical laborites, notably members of the Industrial Workers of the World and local grass-roots movements in the 1930s, projected a free-wheeling, democratic brand of unionism that remains of inspirational and tactical relevance.