Vanessa Tait - Poor Workers’ Unions: Rebuilding Labor from Below

Contents

Praise for Poor Workers Unions

This is a wonderfully sunny history of recent efforts to bring the social justice commitments and tactical innovations of community organizing to the labor movement, and especially to the ranks of low-wage workers.

Frances Fox Piven, coauthor of Poor Peoples Movements: Why They Succeed, How they Fail

This updated and revised edition of Poor Workers Unions provides entry into a multiracial and multi-ethnic multitude of struggles inside and outside the union movement. It remains essential reading for students, scholars, and people who want to make their own history by organizing.

Michael Honey, author of Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther Kings Last Campaign

Poor Workers Unions is a much-needed reinterpretation of the labor movement since the 1960s. Vanessa Tait offers an expansive notion of both the meaning of labor and labor organizingthose who worked in traditional and nontraditional venues, for pay or not, nearly all of whom understood class as intimately bound up with race, gender, and ethnicity. This book offers hope and a vision for building a broad-based workers movement. It is essential reading for anyone who cares about social justice or the future of the labor movement.

Premilla Nadasen, author of Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement

As working people seek to envision a new labor movement, they will find invaluable inspiration in the hidden history of social justice unionism revealed in Vanessa Taits Poor Workers Unions .

Jeremy Brecher, author of Strike! and Climate Insurgency: A Strategy for Survival

This updated edition of Poor Workers Unions more than provides a usable past for todays alt-labor taxi drivers, domestic workers, freelancers, fast-food servers, retail clerks, and day laborers. Vanessa Tait shows that another labor movement is possible, one rooted in racial, gender, immigrant, and economic justice, that bridges community and workplace. In offering strategic lessons and inspiring stories, she envisions a brighter future for the people made by the people for all.

Eileen Boris, coauthor of Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State

Vanessa Taits Poor Workers Unions , upon its original publication a classic of incisive history and lucid interpretation, now reappears at a crucial moment, as the demographic transformation of the working class accelerates. The threat of worsening conditions stands alongside the urgency and the possibility of new organizing. Taits thorough revisions, Fletchers foreword, and Tzintzns afterword add vital updates and reminders. Buy this book and give it to your friends.

Paul Buhle, labor historian and editor of a dozen radical comic books

With gripping tales of grassroots experiments in social justice unionism from the 1960s to the present, Vanessa Tait cracks wide open our concept of what a labor movement looks like, and shows how it can be part and parcel of movements for racial and gender justice. In the process, she does a stunning job of helping us imagine workers movements that are creative, democratic, and, above all, build power from belowpointing the way to a vibrant future for labor.

Dana Frank, author of Bananeras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America

Poor Workers Unions makes a critical contribution to the current debate about how unions can survive, in open-shop conditions, as voluntary membership organizations. Vanessa Tait emphasizes the importance of building workplace power through grassroots organization and rank-and-file control. This book reminds us that greater participatory democracya concept that animated progressive activism in the 1960sshould be the goal of labor and community organizing today.

Steve Early, former organizer for the Communications Workers of America and author of Save Our Unions

While the AFL-CIO and its affiliated unions desperately try to figure out how to rebuild and energize the labor movement, Vanessa Tait reveals in this exceptional book that poor workers have been showing the way for the past forty years. Tait examines and analyzes in meticulous detail a wide range of movements organized by poor workers to improve their circumstances and build a more just society. She demonstrates that these movements were founded and developed upon principles of rank-and-file control, democracy, community involvement, and solidarity and aimed to improve all aspects of workers lives. These are precisely the principles and aims upon which a new labor movement must be based but which the official labor movement has been slow to embrace. Both labor activists and labor historians will learn much from this book.

Michael Yates, author of The Great Inequality and Why Unions Matter

As existing unions continue to bottom out and search fitfully for an answer to declining power and influence, Vanessa Taits Poor Workers Unions reveals the significance of successful labor organizational forms that demand our attention and understanding. Tait demonstrates that organizations with deep roots in communities are essential in paving the way for a more robust union movement in the United States. Bill Fletcher Jr. provides a compelling new foreword assessing challenges ahead as the US working class and trade unions seek to build a counterforce to the rapacious capitalist system. Poor Workers Unions is essential reading for organizers and students of the American labor movement.

Immanuel Ness, author of Southern Insurgency: The Coming of the Global Working Class and professor at City University of New York

Praise for the first edition:

Poor Workers Unions is an important and inspiring book about how workers of color and women workers are taking the lead in building democratic, grassroots labor and community movements even in todays hostile political climate.

Karen Brodkin Sacks, professor of womens studies and anthropology, UCLA

Vanessa Tait has made a critical contribution to broadening our understanding of who and what is the labor movement in the United States. With detail, analysis, and a compelling writing style, Tait captures the dynamism of alternative forms of working-class organization that have long been ignored. In formulating a new direction for organized labor in the United States, the history Tait addresses must become a recognized part of our foundation.

Bill Fletcher, Jr., president, TransAfrica Forum and former assistant to AFL-CIO president John Sweeney

At a time when the US labor movement is engaging in an unprecedented public debate over the course of its futureover what course will best assure that it has a futureone of the luckiest breaks we could hope for would be for an informed and talented labor communicator to publish a book that not only advocates a focus that has been missing from the discussion but also lays out the evidence of the past four decades for why this focus is critical to our success. Poor Workers Unions does all that. This is the most important contribution yet to the current debate over the smartest direction for the labor movements future.

David Swanson, International Labor Communications Association, formerly communications coordinator for ACORN

Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic wont revive the labor movement. Poor Workers Unions examines some of the most exciting and impressive attempts to develop new forms to incorporate workers whom unions have largely neglected. Vanessa Tait makes a valuable contribution to the new impulse by showing us the struggles already under way.

Dan Clawson, author of The Next Upsurge: Labor and the New Social Movements

Vanessa Taits insightful documentation of poor peoples organizing and the labor movement over the last fifty years reminds us of this important history. Poor Workers Unions is evidence that activism is not dead but has been rejuvenated under a broader justice agenda that addresses women and mens everyday lives.