Date: Sun, 18 Aug 1996 10:32:41 -0400 (EDT)
From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: A Changing Labor Movement


1. Labor and Clergy Reunite to Help Society's Underdogs

More than at any other time in decades, religious leaders are making 
common cause with trade unions, lending their moral authority to 
denounce sweatshops, back a higher minimum wage and help organize 
janitors and poultry workers.

The clergy has not lined up with labor to such an extent since the 
heyday of Cesar Chavez, the charismatic farm workers' leader, in the 
1970's and perhaps the Depression, union and religious leaders say.

Many in the clergy say they have rallied to labor's banner because the 
newly revived union movement is addressing what they view as the 
key ethical issues of the day, including the growing gulf between the 
have and have-nots.

"People are becoming poorer and less secure in this era of downsizing, 
and capital has gotten tougher," said Rabbi Arthur Herzberg, former 
national president of the American Jewish Congress. "People in the 
clergy like me who grew up during the New Deal are going back on 
the warpath to defend the weak. Under these circumstances, where else 
would you expect the clergy to be but increasingly on the side of 
labor?"

(NY Times, 8/18/96)


2. The Boys and Girls of (Union) Summer

Twenty-one-year-old Nicola Grunthal is no less than a living 4-foot, 
10-inch trophy for the newly invigorated A.F.L.-C.I.O. It was only two 
summers ago that she was on the fast track to a lifetime of privilege, 
studying to be a diplomat and spending her vacation interning at the 
White House. But now she's changed her plans. She still wants to 
finish Harvard Law School, but "no way I'm going into corporate 
America," she says. "I want to work with labor designing international 
campaigns against multinational corporations. I'm juiced on that idea. 
Really juiced." 

Grunthal had been slowly drifting toward a career in social activism 
since her self-described "disillusionment" with mainstream politics, 
but her new direction jelled only as she was completing her three-week 
stint in the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s first-ever "Union Summer." That program -
- often compared to the civil rights movement's Freedom Summer of 
1964 -- has thrust more than 1,000 mostly young people onto the front 
lines of the U.S. labor movement. In forty-one separate three-week 
"waves" in twenty-two different cities coast to coast, the new recruits 
are given a place to sleep, a light varnishing of labor history, a stipend 
of $210 a week and are then thrown raw into local organizing drives. 

"Put simply, we want to inject a massive dose of class consciousness 
into youth politics," says Andy Levin, the 36-year-old head of Union 
Summer, himself a grad of Harvard Law. "Yes, we want to recruit new 
blood. But more important, we want to transform the politics of the 
next generation of activists." Since the days of Vietnam, says Levin, 
"most young progressives have been either antilabor or have ignored 
labor," falling into single-issue or strict identity politics. "Our message 
is that labor is where it's at in the fight for social justice in the 
nineties."

(Mark Cooper in 8-12/19 Nation Magazine)



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