Editor's Introduction

Editor’s Introduction

Leon Fink

Three features in this issue nicely highlight the challenge of working-class orga- nizing in a postindustrial and generally adverse environment. First, in an extended

exchange with historian Lane Windham, feminist labor organizer Karen Nussbaum

looks back on a long and perpetually innovative activist career. Twenty-two years old

when she and others cofounded 9to5, the Organization for Women Office Workers

in Boston in 1972, Nussbaum continues to draw on a belief that empowering ideas

combined with their imaginative delivery can spark a mass response. Building on

the insights of the women’s movement regarding the relation between the personal

and the political, she has opted for innovative structures that combine group gains

with individual fulfillment, or, as she puts it, “it changes the balance enough so that

it changes the person.” After developing both 9to5 and a parallel clerical-based Ser-

vice Employees International Union local, she served as Women’s Bureau Director

in the Clinton White House with a focus on investigation as well as grassroots com-

munity meetings. Soon, New Voice AFL-CIO President John Sweeney tapped her

to direct the federation’s new Working Women’s Department. Beginning in 2000 she

turned her attention to the growing crisis of working-class families and communities

outside the labor movement: the result was Working America, a new kind of labor

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at a combination of tangible economic benefits and political mobilization. In this

interview, she focuses on the fundamental challenges facing Working America, espe-

cially the question of sustainability.

Even as the harsh winds of Reaganism were, by the mid-1980s, beating down

on the established trade union movement as well as on new shoots like 9to5, imagi-

native spirits were already cooking up new strategies that would ultimately come to

be grouped as “alt-Labor.” Among them, one of the most prominent and enduring

was the Jobs with Justice Coalition (JwJ), which sought, initially at least, to turn the

conservatives’ use of “country” and “family values” on its head via a spirited defense

of local community interests, or what historian Eric Larson calls “working-class

Americanism.” Yet steering a path between local solidarities and a defensive provin-

cialism, Larson argues, proved difficult, indeed so much so that by the mid-1990s JwJ

sought new, more internationalist ideological moorings.

As Timothy Minchin documents, the Solidarity Day demonstration in

Washington, DC, in September 1981 proved a most impressive demonstration of

Big Labor’s ability to move masses to the national capitol but with little resulting

resonance among participants, let alone the larger culture. In “perhaps the largest

mass march in U.S. history,” a Lane Kirkland–led AFL-CIO attempted to confront

President Reagan’s larger antilabor and budget-cutting agenda only months after

the destruction of the air traffic controllers’ strike. Yet, when remembered at all,

the march has since served more as a symbol of labor’s decline than of its rebirth.

Minchin offers a mixed and subtle assessment of both modest achievements regis-

tered by the event and reasons for its ultimately limited impact. Among the former

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were substantial Democratic gains in the 1982 congressional elections as well as a

model by which a latter-day federation leadership (à la Nussbaum and JwJ) would

begin to draw in broader community constituencies. Among the latter was the feder-

ation’s acute discomfort with the controllers’ strike, which in an important sense had

already shifted the public’s focus before the march took place, as well as an inability

to define more concrete and appropriately unifying ends and demands.

As Daniel Tichenor pithily summarizes reaction to the Immigration

and Nationality (or Hart-Celler) Act of 1965, “nearly all observers agree that this

legislation was transformative, but they concur on little else.” Here, on its golden

anniversary, four immigration experts parse the act’s larger meaning and enduring

controversy. In Tichenor’s telling, a classically messy political compromise balanced

the ending of racial and ethnic quotas with a new favoritism toward family reunifi-

cation as well as ultimately unworkable new quotas on Latin American entry. Mae

Ngai offers historical context both for the law’s passage and for its limits. As she

suggests, a civil rights/labor–based coalition breathed life into the melting-pot dream

at a time of sustained economic growth; at the same time, the principle of family

reunification proved cruelly exclusionary, particularly with regard to low-wage immi-

grants who were mostly shuttled to the category of temporary and/or undocumented

workers. For unskilled agricultural workers, Cindy Hahamovitch makes clear, the

1965 act proved no milestone at all: more important, in a largely negative way, was

the earlier McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 that at once continued to bar indigent labor

from a path to citizenship and opened a door to massive guest-worker programs.

If Hahamovitch provides a more extended chronological context to make sense of

modern-day immigration reform, Canadian political scientist Christina Gabriel

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same antidiscrimination era in which the United States leaned heavily toward family

reunification, Canadian policy prioritized a skills-based system, though with what

comparative equity results is not so obvious.

Among a host of new books, the best executed, according to our reviewers,

include: Lara Vapnek’s quest for Leonora O’Reilly and the long fight for women’s

economic independence, James J. Lorence’s study of Mexican-American strike leader

Clinton Jencks, Joan Sangster on post-WWII Canadian women, David Burns’s treat-

ment of the radical Jesus, Jacquelyn Jones’s historical portraiture of the myth of race,

complementary studies of borderland slavery by Matthew Salafia and Diane Mutti

Burke, and Stacey L. Smith on California slavery and politics. In addition, David

Brody usefully engages Julius G. Getman’s retrospective analysis on the unions’

decline, while Emily E. LB. Twarog does the same for the monumental Samuel

Gompers Papers.

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