Book Review: Homestead Steel Mill—the Final Ten Years: USWA Local 1397 and the Fight for Union Democracy by Mike Stout

 

Homestead Steel Mill—the Final Ten Years: USWA Local 1397 and the Fight for Union Democracy
Author: Mike Stout • Introduction: JoAnn Wypijewski • Afterword: Staughton Lynd
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 9781629637914/9781629638553
Published: 6/2020
Format: Paperback/Hardcover
Page count: 352

“For a short period, the rank-and-file movement at Homestead was an experiment in democracy like nothing I’ve seen or red about anywhere else. The takeover and restructuring of the grievance procedure by a few high school graduates who put it in the service of thousands of members was unparalleled anywhere in the union. The 1397 Rank and File newspaper was the ultimate expression of truth, democracy, and free speech. Every member had a voice, if he or she chose to use it. Art, culture, union politics, muckraking journalism, and a free press became a power4ful weapon in the hands of ordinary workers, The fact that it only lasted eight years is beside the point; it should serve as a temple for future generations of workers, unionized or not. Bureaucracies and structures are not the unio, or any organization, for that matter. The members are the union. The union is only as powerful as the sum of all its workers speaking with one voice.” (Stout, pp. 285-286)

I regret that it has taken me four years to get to reading and reviewing this book. Homestead Steel Mill remains a worthy guide for people engaged in organizing for power in their workplace and union and is a strong contribution to labor history and understanding working-class life and activism in the 1970s and 1980s. Mike Stout has written a readable and fast-moving account of some of the fights that took place in those years for workers’ rights, union democracy, and saving jobs and communities in what has unfortunately since come to be known as the Rust Belt. If we take Homestead Steel Mill, Jon Melrod’s Fighting Times, and David Van Deusen’s Insurgent Labor---all published by PM Press---we have a helpful compass for progressive and radical workers to use as they go about their work of building resilient democratic action and leadership and attempting to win others over to their social vision.

The Homestead Steel Works was constructed in Homestead, Pennsylvania the early 1880s and was taken over by U.S. Steel around the turn of the century. The mill once employed 15,000 people and was intrinsic to the Steel Valley that held the Pittsburgh region and extended into West Virginia and Ohio. If we consider the coal, chemicals, river and road traffic, labor pools, transportation hubs, the ancillary industries involved in producing steel, and the how that steel was ultimately used, the direct influence of the Steel Valley mills extended into Virginia, Kentucky, and Michigan. U.S. Steel and the Homestead Works produced for national and global markets.

The region formed a center for industrial unionism and other social movements as much as it formed a center for steel and other industrial production and distribution. The Homestead Works and the workers who worked there and in nearby mills, and the Steel Valley communities, still hold a preeminent place in our labor history. Even now, thirty-eight years after the Homestead Works closed, we remember the dramatic 1892 Homestead strike, the strike movements that rocked the region in the aftermath of the First World War, and the steel strikes of 1946 and 1952. All of these were accompanied by pro-union community mobilizations in the steel-producing communities and all of them worked to establish industrial unionism. And in helping to establish industrial unionism these workers and their communities did much to extend democracy and better working and living conditions for workers across North America.

The River Ran Red: The 1892 Homestead Steel Strike, 

An Uprising That Became History

Mike Stout came to work as a crane operator at Homestead in 1977. That was a relatively prosperous moment for young people going into basic industry, although the effects of the post-Vietnam War recession and the so-called “gas crisis” of the 1972-1975 years was lingering and employment in the auto industry and in coal mining and in some large steel mills was not steady.

Workers in these industries nonetheless considered that they had good reason t be optimistic about their futures. Young workers who had been influenced by the political and cultural movements of the 1960s and early 1970s, veterans returning from the war and occupation zones, workers of color, and women who were entering basic industry showed an interest in cooperating to fight for and win more than what was on the table. United Steelworkers Local 1397 (and see here), the lead union at Homestead, had members from all these demographics, and Stout quickly learned that he had walked into a complicated work and union situation that showed some promise for radical possibilities. He and some coworkers who were similarly minded founded a union caucus and set about publishing an independent newspaper and building leadership. With the skillful used of grievances and grievance handling, and through confrontations with the company and with union leadership, and by coalescing with others who represented different (and sometimes opposing) interests the militant and democratically-minded caucus took power in Local 1397.

Stout became an exceptional union steward. Stout and the movement for democratic change within Local 1397 were greatly assisted by the existence of Section 2-B of the Basic Steel Agreement that, as Staughton Lynd says in his afterword in the book, “provided that local practices and agreements, even oral agreements, could be enforced” and by the relative freedom Stout and another steward had to “decide whether to take a grievance to arbitration” and to involve workers at every step of the grievance process. Jon Melrod also details in Fighting Times how important it was to have outstanding contract language at American Motors that helped stewards organize their coworkers and gave union members an active stake in the outcome of grievances. Corporate America has fought unions before arbitrators and in the courts and through the political process to get rid of such contract language, and most unions have conceded in these attacks or have lost heroic fights over maintaining such strong contract language, and so it is hard to impress upon union members today why we need to take back what has been lost.

Stout’s book sets the record straight here and makes a compelling case for strong contract language that allows for winning past practices grievances and helps stewards organize their coworkers to use a variety of strong tactics to win grievances. He doesn’t say it, but what Stout is arguing for is a sophisticated understanding of how workers control some aspects of our work, formally and informally, and for union-led fightbacks when this control is challenged by management. Union contracts are negotiated in the workplace every day and in every grievance and in the actions taken by workers and their unions and, as well, by the employers and managers.

Another strong factor that helped the militants in Local 1397 get elected to union offices and build their local union’s capacity to beat the company in many areas was capable leadership. To hear him tell it, Stout was a strong and fearless union leader, and he worked with many others who were most often driven by good and selfless intentions. It’s to Stout’s great credit that he mentions most of the people who he allied with and gives them their props. Ron Weisen, who served as president of Local 1397 for many years, rightfully gets top billing here. Weisen was larger-than-life, pugnacious, and complex. Stout gives readers an excellent introductory study of Weisen. I say “introductory” here because Ron Weisen deserves a book of his own.

Rank and File Demonstration led by the late Ronald Weisen, activist

 and later President of Homestead Local

USWA Headquarters, April 14, 1977

(Steffi Domike Collection, UE/Labor 97:20)

So, what happened?

 U.S. Steel didn’t invest in the Homestead Works and in the Steel Valley much after the Second Word War. Taxpayers and the regional, state, and federal governments often footed the bill for what the steel industry demanded. Industrial policy, such as it was, gave the industry needed breaks without looking at the long-term picture or the consequences of these policies. U.S. Steel grew lazy, inefficient, and bureaucratic and used some of its profits to buy Marathon Oil and other entities and to invest in foreign steel production. The company took a harder line in its relations with Local 1397 as it closed facilities and departments and laid-off workers, willfully violating the contract and attempting to bribe Stout and others rather than negotiate. In one political moment the company was threatened by globalization, made globalization work for its own interests, and shaped globalization by using its economic and political power.

Stout records that over 27,000 U.S. Steel workers in the Mon Valley region, or the towns and municipalities situated on or near the Monongahela River, lost their jobs between 1979 and 1986. “The Company relentlessly poured capital into facilities overseas and downsized their steel operations at home, while divesting into other more profitable businesses like oil and real estate,” Stout says. “No number of concessions would have changed this reality. It would have taken a nationwide workers’ revolution, a general strike, and a federally funded industrial policy to reverse this globalization process.”

We did not respond with a general strike, of course, and the United States does not have a real industrial policy. But Steel Valley and Mon Valley communities responded to the crises created by U.S. Steel and other companies and globalization by fighting back as the shock of the blows directed against them wore off. Organizations of the unemployed, food banks, and committees of one kind or another were created through the region. The Tri-State Conference on Steel (TSCS) was the most creative and far-reaching of these efforts. TSCS at one time or another fought for the use of eminent domain to save the mills, helped get the needed studies done to demonstrate that steel and other regional production could be carried on and make money, and supported a strategy of worker or cooperative ownership of facilities where that might have been feasible. Stout helped lead the TSCS effort. It was a remarkable coalition effort that was sabotaged by capitalists who did not want competition, Mellon Bank and other financial institutions who stood to profit from disinvestment in steel and the remaking of the Pittsburgh region, and politicians and bureaucrats who were swept along by the globalization tsunami. There was ineptness on labor’s part as well. Stout gives a credible behind-the-scenes account of why the TSCS vision didn’t prevail, but he’s right in pointing to it as an advance n working-class struggles and as something still worth studying.

More difficult to situate is the Denominational Ministry Strategy (DMS), a small church-based project that still exists. DMS may have its origins in the movement started by Saul Alinsky, but it has remained under the leadership of Charles Honeywell since its founding and has taken a path that few other organizations of its kind have. The group never believed in building a movement or in joining in mass action. Rather, Honeywell and some of those around him focused on exposing the links between Mellon Bank and other financial institutions and corporate, church, union, and community leaders and sometimes taking actions to expose these ties and underscore how unjust and ruinous these ties were. Stout shows how Honeywell and DMS did a good job of mapping these ties and turning people out to community meetings when the mills began to close, but he also makes a good argument that the focus and tactics used by DMS often worked to distract from the caucus work being done in Local 1397 and to undermine the work being done by TSCS and other organizations. There were moments when DMS actions were destructive. Still, Ron Weisen and some of his closest followers stuck with DMS through some very tough times.

What Stout misses here is that Honeywell and DMS often challenged potential followers to clarify their values and commit to engaging in dramatic tactics in the context of being members of a church- or affinity-based collective and that this process, when done through even a small and wannabe hierarchy during a time of social crisis and disorientation, pushed people to the margins and gave DMS the appearance of being a cult. DMS was, and is, anti-political and has tended to be driven in part by conspiracy theories. It has sought to use confrontation and polarization both as a means of making clear that there are conflicts with opposing sides and as a means of winning people over to the DMS side. All of this has been done from what DMS has taken to be a prophetic and Biblical position.

From a DMS point of view the U.S. Steel acquisitions in the 1980s looked something like the mergers that created the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (1988) and the United Steel, Paper and Forestry, Rubber, Manufacturing, Energy, Allied Industrial and Service Workers International Union out of the old United Steelworkers (2004). A conspiracy theory-driven religious group will see a need to expose and fight what they perceive as being top-down, systemic, and ungodly evils no matter where these evils show themselves. The DMS road is full of potholes, but Stout forgets or overlooks that a core group of DMS participants paid stiff prices, including jail time and blacklisting, for their work and still had nothing to show for all of that. He does note that DMS lost much of the following that it had among union activists, but the core DMS group persisted despite the overwhelming evidence that they were headed in the wrong direction. 

Stout also neglects to mention that one local union leader with ties to DMS ran for president of his union and was shut out from winning when the union’s administration violated labor laws and the union’s constitution and by-laws and when he was betrayed by leftists in his union---and he still did not believe in forming a union caucus to carry on the fight. Stout is more focused on how he was unfairly attacked by DMS and by the damage done by the group in Local 1397 and the TSCS. It was common for DMS to refer to Stout and others on his side of things as “whores” and it is striking and unfortunate that Stout uses that terrible epithet to describe others in the book.

Some good questions arise here. Is it not to be expected that people will question their deepest-held beliefs when a social crisis of the sort that U.S. Steel and the banks created takes place? Stout states in his book that the attention and pressure needed to stay on Mellon Bank and U.S. Steel in order for workers to win the day and that DMS took away from that. But is it reasonble to expect that people won't go in many different and sometimes contradictory directions once the gates open and organizing takes off? Could the drive that created DMS have been channeled into creating a positive and progressive response and organizing by the churches and other religious institutions in response to the crises of the mills closing? Why hasn’t a theology of liberation taken root in the Steel Valley?

Wrapping Up

This is an important book and I hope that it will be widely read. It’s written with honesty, heart, and soul. The book correctly emphasizes how important face-to-face contact, relationships, workplace newspapers, honesty and integrity, and good grievance handling and contract language are to workplace organizing. The book describes most of the qualities that every left-of-center activist and organizer needs to be successful.

There are sections of Homestead Steel Mill that remind me of scenes in Thomas Bell's Out of This Furnace, a 1930s novel about immigrant steel workers and their families and communities and the founding and early growth of the United Steelworkers in the Steel Valley. That novel is our greatest proletarian novel. In one winning scene Bell has a leading character thinking

Yet he clung to his belief that the mass of men were in their hearts good, preferring the excellent to the shoddy, the true to the false, striving for all their blunders toward worthy goals and failing most often when they put their trust in leaders rather than themselves. Unless this was so he felt that there was no use going on. Unless this could be proved true here and now, today, in the teeming alleys and courtyards and kitchens of the First Ward, it was true nowhere, never. And unless it was true there was no hope.

It never entered his mind that he himself was all the proof and hope he needed. 

This is the splendid poetry of class struggle but it gives room for exploring contradictions and questions that hover in the backgrounds of Bell's great book and Homestead Steel Mill. Should we not trust in leaders even when these leaders come from the working-class, when they are the women and men working next to us, when they are the Mike Stouts and Ron Weisens of our world? Can every other class in society produce and maintain leaders except the working class?     

With those questions in mind I offer these reservations that I have when I consider Homestead Steel Mill: 

1.      Stout does not mention having been part of a politically-motivated collective while he did his best union work. He relied on networks of coworkers and friends instead. I’m left pondering why he apparently rejected existing political organizations that shared his views and how his work might have been different if he had joined a left-wing organization.

2.     Stout makes a good case that an independent working-class political organization is needed now, but he doesn’t identify what this might be or how it should develop. Why didn't the defensive strikes that were underway in the Steel Valley region as the mills were closing and the movement that pushed the Tri-State Conference on Steel forward create a regional progressive political formation of some kind?

3.      Stout’s social vision depends on radical solidarity, and yet he records in his book many instances when solidarity went missing or failed and when union militants voted for Reagen. He is honest about the deep-running racism and sexism that he ran up against in dealing with his coworkers and fellow militants. How does he square his long-term social vision with the knowledge that working-class solidarity can be weak, non-existant, contradictory, or even sometimes buttress and support exclusivism, racism, and sexism? Has the reality that he has worked with ever caused him to question his goals and vision and adjust his thinking?  

4.     Stout wants labor to speak with one voice and have one program and bring along with us the politicians who he despises. It may be better said that he and those who agree with him want labor to be remade in their image, with their voice and their program. I’m not sure that people who we despise will come along with us, no matter how compelling our voice and our unity. It seems dangerous and unwise for radicals to argue for uniformity; this can turn against minorities, and majorities speaking with one vpoice and one program can become tyrannical. Aren't we better served by a diversity of opinions expressed through united front organizations? Does it make sense that a highly disciplined labor movement can or will fit into the divided and undisciplined and identity-politics-driven and street-driven U.S. left?  

5.      Stout wants one big union of steel workers and other workers, and yet he was dissatisfied (often for good reason) with the one big union that was the United Steel Workers. I think that our argument here is less about form and more about content. Will labor radicals forever look to creating alternative institutions when mainstream institutions fail?

6.      Stout ran for a state legislative position. Readers would have benefitted from learning more about his campaign and his political program.

7.      The book makes a case for what is often called “workerism” and “rank-and-fileism,” or the centering of the experiences and knowledge of workers in movement-building and as an alternative to politically-based organizing. This has great value to the extent that it helps us understand some of the dynamics of class struggle but it begins to lose its luster when we consider big-picture and broad political questions. The fightback shown by the militants in Local 1397 and by the activists in the Tri-State Conference on Steel were valiant efforts. They were not so much defeated as they were outmaneuvered, and they have become part of a working-class legacy that still holds lessons for us and much promise for the future. But what are the practical limits to centering our working-class knowledge and experiences and leaving things there?

8.      I want to take issue with Stout’s defense of smoking dope and his offhanded rejection of sobriety. The left and labor both have much to learn from the recovery movements, and both the left and labor need to be open to workers who are in recovery.

In closing, I want to say that I knew Ron Weisen and met many of the people mentioned in Homestead Steel Mill. The book helped me recall many people and events that have slipped from my memory. Ron took an almost paternal interest in me and one late night convinced me to do something absolutely crazy on behalf of DMS or Local 1397. I was never sure which body I was acting on behalf of. I was married by a DMS-affiliated pastor. I went on the road with the DMS-influenced local union officer referred to above who was running for president of his union and I hit a wall when I tried to convince him to see a bigger picture. Still, we and Ron Weisen and some others travelled to Minnesota together several times in order to support the striking Hormel workers and we participated in the founding conference of the short-lived National Rank and File Against Concessions organization. I tried to work with the Mon Valley Unemployed Committee (MVUC), which Stout talks about in the book, and duplicate what it was doing in West Virginia without success. I took some of what I learned from the TSCS, the MVUC, and DMS into many other struggles with mixed results. I deeply regret that that I was temporarily blinded by some anti-left prejudices and workerism in the years that Stout wrote about. These prejudices stopped me from appreciating his great work. I could have done much more, and done it all much better, had I paid more and better attention to Mike Stout.

For more on Mike Stout and Homestead Steel Mill watch this:

Book Review: FIGHTING TIMES: Organizing on the Front Lines of the Class War by Jon Melrod

FIGHTING TIMES: Organizing on the Front Lines of the Class War

by Jon  Melrod

PM Press. 320 pp. Paperback, epub and PDF editions.

The PM Press blurb describing writer-activist Jon Melroad reads as follows:

Born into the political and cultural quiescence of the 1950s, Jon Melrod grew up in apartheid-like Washington DC. Active in the student movement that opposed the Vietnam War and a supporter of black liberation, Jon embraced the ideology that the working class held the power to radically transform society. He left the campus for the factory in 1973. For thirteen years, he immersed himself in the day-to-day struggles of Milwaukee’s working class, both on the factory floor and in the political arena. Despite FBI surveillance and interference, Jon organized a militant rank-and-file caucus and rose through union ranks to a top leadership position in UAW Local 72. After a mass workforce cutback imposed by AMC’s joint venture partner Renault, he left to attend Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco in 1985. Graduating cum laude with a JD, he opened a law firm in San Francisco, successfully representing hundreds of political refugees.

This is a good introduction to the author of Fighting Times: Organizing on the Front Lines of the Class War and the book but much more needs to be said. Another introduction to Melrod and his work and a recent interview that he did with Valley Labor Report is here.

Jon Melrod was one of many campus activists who left academia to take work in factories, mills, and coal mines in the late 1960s and 1970s to assimilate into the blue-collar sections of the working-class and build a socialist movement from that base. Most of the people who took that path were quite dedicated to their politics and to their organizations, and taking the steps that they did and staying with it required a special level of self-discipline and a love for the working-class. Many of them failed, but many more had an overall positive impact on the lives and well-being of others and have much to teach today. A few memoirs from this generation of activists and those who followed immediately in their footsteps are available and are worth reading (see here, here, and here). In Melrod's case, his work around dangerous chemicals and work processes brought on a diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer which he has managed to beat.

This book can be read as an interesting memoir and as a needed contribution to labor history. It tells us much about how auto workers lived and worked in the Midwest in 1970s and early 1980s and as the auto industry in the United States bottomed-out for a time and took part of the labor movement with us. It describes in good detail important aspects of union-management conflict in the Kenosha, Wisconsin AMC plant and intra-union conflicts as well. UAW Local 72, the union local representing the Kenosha plant, had a history of militant struggle behind it by the time that Melrod arrived there. Union stewards had real power in the plant of a kind that is hard to recall and explain to young workers today. The local was an example of social justice unionism working relatively well when corporate America and many in the labor movement found this type of unionism suspect or dangerous.

That proud history of the union pushing back against the company and winning many key battles over the years and developing a relatively democratic internal structure and culture was incomplete or unfinished, according to Melrod. Racial and gender-based segregation persisted, racist and sexist supervisors and workers presented special problems, and Local 72 was at times vulnerable to bad internal leadership and to pressure from UAW top leadership. The Local 72 union contract had many outstanding features that gave the union some needed advantages, but pay and benefits lagged behind the contracts covering the Big Three. AMC workers, like all auto workers, were employed in an industry that depended on consumer choices and, but the AMC workers had less job security than workers employed by the Big Three.

Melrod's book can also be read as a guide to organizing, mobilizing and action for young and radical workers, and it's here that the author does his best work. Readers who take up Fighting Times as a kind of training manual should read the book slowly and with some deliberation. Melrod became a successful local union activist and leader by taking strategic and deliberate steps and by working with others and by doing his best to fit in to his work groups while still maintaining his principles. There are real challenges to doing this day by day and every day and coming out ahead and the book goes into some detail when discussing the specific challenges that Melrod and his comrades faced. The author takes readers through many of the basics of workplace agitation and building a caucus within a union, becoming a vocal and radical anti-racist and anti-sexist union steward, resisting the inevitable attacks by conservative coworkers and bosses, movement building at work and in the community, negotiating, and even building international solidarity. Melrod was fired and won reinstatement, he and others who he cooperated with to print a radical bulletin were sued and won, he was threatened and had his car vandalized and survived, he ran for union office and took a couple of losses before he and a slate of radicals and progressives won, and he reached out to Black, Chicano and women workers in his plant and built principled unity with them. The FBI helped blacklist him, and he went through years of being redbaited, but he won many of his coworkers to his side. All of this took place under extraordinarily stressful conditions. 

I want to underscore that I found Fighting Times to be a much better and more useful teaching tool than Jane McAlevey's popular No Shortcuts or Hamilton Nolan's The Hammer. Readers should keep in mind that Melrod remains a committed revolutionary and comes from a place that McAlevey and Nolan have not. Melrod describes describes class conflict and class war but doesn't use the too-popular rhetoric of "class struggle unionism." He takes up how to handle losing fights against the bosses and still maintain radical hopes and perspective. These political differences matter.

The book does have some shortcomings. Melrod doesn't mention it, but he was a part of a tendency known as the New Communist Movement (NCM), at least for a time. NCM activists were often hardcore and especially dedicated people who were just as often a bit ahead of the political curve and trends on the Left. The book doesn't give readers much insight into this side of Melrod's considerable political work or tell us much about how his political and union commitments dovetailed and what happened when they didn't. There are also moments in the book when Melrod loses needed objectivity and could have, or should have, shown more understanding. There are passing moments when he relies on stereotypes to describe people. He writes with a particular symmetry of the relationships between class, race, gender, and labor in mind but he doesn't explain this or provide context for this. None of these shortcomings are of such importance that you shouldn't buy this book and study it carefully. 

I understand that the first PM Press book run has nearly sold out. I hope that the publisher will do a second run and that Jon Melrod can do a book tour.

Robert Bruno and What Work Is---How do we think about work and workers?

From an essay by Robert Bruno on the Labor & Working-Class History Association website:

In my book, What Work Is, I assert that work has an enormous contradictory impact on the workers and society they build. Anthropologist Herbert Applebaum draws on a biological metaphor to centralize the importance of work to the individual and society. Work, he notes, “is like the spine which structures the way people live, how they make contact with material and social reality, and how they achieve status and self-esteem.”[1] There’s much that makes us human, but work—fully understood—is critical to our individual and social development. Society itself emanates from how we make, distribute, and use the products of our collective labor. Karl Marx stated it as an immutable law that “Labor … is the condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society.” It is an “eternal and natural necessity which mediates … life itself.”[2]

As the United States struggles with an unchartered and unprecedented change in how people will work and think about work, my book recommends a “future of work” that listens to what workers say, “work is.” The thesis of the book is that as we formulate new work structures, we should draw from what workers have appropriated from their work experiences. My intention is that we first learn from what workers can tell us about their present work to know how to design a future of what work should be.

The voices of workers should be prioritized in developing public policies and workplace practices that endeavor to make work more respectful of human life and harmonious with the natural and social world. What workers tell us about “what work is” should inform how leaders of political, business, labor, educational, media and cultural institutions think about the ubiquitous act of working for a living. The reality of work won’t be changed unless we recognize what a complicated, contradictory, glorious, and poetic experience work is. To change what our society does with work and to workers requires first understanding how workers experience their labor. Listening to voices from the point of production is the beginning of thinking differently about work.

Read the entire essay here.

Why Libraries Still Matter---Oregon State Senator Deb Patterson

Why Libraries Still Matter

In this day and age, when most folks hold information in their hands every moment through smart phones or other devices, it might be easy to ask if libraries even matter anymore. However, our public libraries continue to play a crucial role in our communities, and we must find ways to help both school libraries and community libraries have the funds to maintain their staffs and budgets for needed services.

Libraries provide free access not just to books, but to a wealth of information and resources, along with assistance on how to access them. The staff at libraries promote literacy for people of all ages and provide resources for learners of other languages.

Libraries maintain documents that help to preserve our history. They offer space for community meetings and classes. They also provide a safe space where everyone is free to read, study, or just rest, and this is provided to all, regardless of ability to pay.

I was thrilled recently to be able to participate in the announcement that the State has allocated funds to match those from the Dolly Parton Imagination Library, an initiative that I co-sponsored with House Majority Leader Ben Bowman. This program delivers one book a month to every child who takes part from birth to age five, and it will soon be available across Oregon. Please tell your neighbors and friends about this wonderful opportunity. Every child deserves the opportunity to develop a love of reading, which can be nurtured lifelong by our public libraries.

Thank you for reading this – and please stay in touch!

All the best,

Deb

Books, Films, & Music That You Masy Have Missed (From Matt Witt)

For many years now Matt Witt has been providing short emails about books, films, and music having to do with labor, social conditions and the environment that we may have missed and want to look up. There is something from almost anyone in his lists. Matt lives here in Oregon and I want to recommend subscribing to his email list and supporting his artistic work as well. Here is a sampling from one of his recent emails:

BOOKS

Dixon, Descending by Karen Outen (Dutton). A school psychologist named Dixon and his brother set out to become the first Black Americans to climb Mount Everest. This unusual and profoundly sad novel toggles between their time on the mountain and Dixon’s work and personal life before and after the climb.

Fire in the Canyon by Daniel Gumbiner (Astra). Ben and Ada get by financially on their small family farm in rural California, where he grows wine grapes and she writes novels. But the new reality of climate-fueled fire and smoke that is affecting so many communities threatens the future for them and their grown son.

In The Pines by Grace Elizabeth Hale (Little, Brown). According to legend in the author’s family, her grandfather, who served as sheriff in a rural Mississippi county, stood up to a mob that wanted to lynch a Black man jailed for allegedly raping a white woman. A meticulous historian and skilled writer, Hale uncovered the ugly truth about what actually happened.

The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi (Picador). A very readable history begins in 1917 when the British government announced that it planned to support creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, where Jews constituted 6% of the population. In 1919, a commission established by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson went to the region and reported that the Zionists who supported that plan “looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine.” The commission warned Wilson that “if the American government decided to support the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine they are committing the American people to the use of force in that area, since only by force can a Jewish state in Palestine be established or maintained.” The book recounts how force has been used since then to steadily expand the territory taken from Palestinian families and deprive them of basic human rights. It also describes how many Palestinians have become increasingly desperate as their situation worsens.

Wall Street’s War on Workers by Les Leopold (Chelsea Green). A respected researcher and educator presents facts to challenge myths commonly asserted by the corporate media and national leaders of the Democratic Party. Working class voters are rebelling primarily because politicians have stood by while big corporations and billionaires have destroyed jobs and communities in ways that are not allowed in some other industrialized countries. Rebuilding a winning political coalition will require challenging corporate power with effective policies, not just rhetoric at election time.

Behind the Startup by Benjamin Shestakofsky (University of California). Problems with tech companies are often attributed to the technologies themselves. But most of the tech industry is dominated by venture capital “investors” who demand rapid growth so they can reap huge gains when a company or their stake is eventually sold. Their profits often come at the expense of workers, customers, and communities, and are a major cause of inequality in America. Especially since venture capitalists often benefit from public funding and investments from pension funds, public officials and regulators should support other models, including nonprofit corporations and cooperatives.

Dignity Not Debt by Chrystin Ondersma (University of California). We are taught that debt and bankruptcy result from personal failings and bad choices. But debt is built into our economic system of inequality and exploitation. Many households must incur debt for medical needs, groceries, utilities, housing, education, transportation, or other basic needs, and then are subject to financial predators. Systemic change is required so people can meet those needs without going into debt.

National Parks, Native Sovereignty edited by Christina Gish Hill, Matthew J. Hill, and Brooke Neely (University of Oklahoma). People who have participated in or studied projects that involved collaboration between the National Park Service and Tribal nations discuss the possibilities and limitations of those experiments.

Journalists and Their Shadows by Patrick Lawrence (Clarity). A veteran journalist critiques the close relationship between the corporate media and those who wield economic and political power, and encourages the public to look to independent journalism for factual information. “We can no longer read…the corporate press to…know what happened,” he writes. Now we read “to know what we are supposed to think happened. Then we go in search of accurate accounts of what happened.”

Ron Carey and the Teamsters by Ken Reiman (Monthly Review). A retired UPS driver has written a tribute to the former head of his local union, the late Ron Carey, who courageously took on the corrupt leadership of the Teamsters in the 1990s. With the support of a longstanding rank-and-file movement called Teamsters for a Democratic Union, Carey became the union’s national president and led the historic UPS strike of 1997. The strike was a groundbreaking challenge to corporations’ shift to low-paying, “throwaway jobs” and helped set the stage for the Occupy movement, the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016, organizing at companies like Starbucks, and more recent high-profile national contract campaigns by the Teamsters and the UAW. Under Carey, the union also became a leading grassroots voice urging Democratic politicians like the Clintons not to join the push by big corporations and Republicans for trade agreements like NAFTA that hurt workers in all the affected countries. Had the Democrats listened, perhaps fewer voters in industrial states would eventually have turned to a candidate like Trump. A short afterword to the book by two experienced labor organizers draws a few lessons for today’s union reformers.

FILMS

A Very British Coup. In this three-part series made in 1988, a third-generation steelworker is elected prime minister of England and begins to implement the policies he promised: pro-worker, pro-environment, and anti-imperialist. The real powers that be, including the British economic royalty, military, media, and spy agencies and the U.S. government, mobilize to try to bring him down.

Three Summers. A working class Brazilian woman who serves as property and events manager for a rich family proves to be more resourceful and resilient than her bosses.

La Syndicaliste. Based on the true story of a union leader at a French nuclear power company who became a whistleblower, first her body and then her credibility are attacked in an attempt to cover up corporate and political wrongdoing.

Arc of Justice. A 22-minute documentary tells the story of the first community land trust in the U.S. It was started in 1969 by Black voting rights organizers in southwest Georgia who decided that building a cooperative community on Black-owned land should be the next step in their struggle.

MUSIC

After the Revolution by Carsie Blanton. No singer writes better songs for our time. Blanton sings about hope, love, and friendship as the empire falls and people revolt all over the world.

Sara Nelson & Hamilton Nolan to speak in Corvallis on Saturday, Feb. 17

The Hammer looks at the simmering battle inside of the labor movement over how to tap into its revolutionary potential--or allow it to be squandered--will determine the economic and social course of American life for years to come.

Hamilton Nolan is a labor journalist who writes regularly for In These Times magazine and The Guardian. He has written about labor, politics, and class war for The New York Times, the Washington Post, Gawker, Splinter, and other publications. He was the longest-serving writer in Gawker’s history, and was a leader in unionizing Gawker Media in 2015. Hamilton is a proud member of the Writers Guild of America, East. He lives in Brooklyn.

Sara Nelson is the international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO and a Corvallis native.

Date: 02/17/2024
Time: 2:00pm - 4:00pmPlace: The Corvallis Book Bin
215 SW 4th St
Corvallis, OR 97333

Sara Nelson and Hamilton Nolan to speak in Portland on February 18

Hamilton Nolan in Conversation With Sara Nelson

Sunday, February 18 @ 3pm (PT) / Powell’s City of Books

The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor (Hachette) is a timely exploration of the American labor movement and its critical place in our society and politics, from  labor reporter Hamilton Nolan. Inequality is America’s biggest problem. Unions are the single strongest tool that working people have to fix it. Organized labor has been in decline for decades. Yet it sits today at a moment of enormous opportunity. The Hammer is an on-the-ground excavation of the past, present, and future of the American labor movement. Nolan will be joined in conversation by Sara Nelson, International President of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA.

Hard Ball Press to issue a powerful historical novel about west coast longshore workers

Hard Ball Press publishes great books for working people. Here is an announcement of a forthcoming book that you won't want to miss.

In December, 1980, an officer with the longshoremen’s union in San Francisco learned there was a shipment of military weapons on the docks waiting to be loaded onto a ship bound for the fascist government of El Salvador. Ronald Reagan had just been elected president on a right wing, pro—fascist agenda. The El Salvador government was murdering thousands of its citizens.

Herb Mills, an officer in that ILWU Local, proposed that the union refuse to load the weapons -a direct violation of their union contract that could lead to the officers going to jail and the government taking over the union.

Could they stop the shipment and keep out of jail?

Out of his personal diary and historical union records, Mills fashioned Presente, A Dockworker Story, a fictional account of that campaign. The names have been changed, but the courage and the daring of the union men and women have not.

Release date: March 7, 2024