the feminist Equal Rights Advocates and the Public Justice Center. Joining their ..... social contract involved bargaining between capital, labor, and the state, the .... lawyers and engineers, not just call center operators, is being outsourced to.
BOOK REVIEWS
Featherstone, Liza. Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart. New York: Basic Books, 2004. 282 pp. $25.00 (hardcover).
Is Wal-Mart good for women? Journalist Liza Featherstone answers with a resounding “no!” Based on interviews with current and former employees, including plaintiffs in the largest class action suit ever filed, Betty Dukes v. WalMart Stores, Inc., Featherstone suggests that low prices, one-stop shopping, and big sizes are not enough to compensate for the global economic distortions initiated by the Bentonville, Arkansas retail colossus. “From the Third World factories in which Wal-Mart’s cheap products are made to the floor of your local Wal-Mart where they’re displayed and sold, it is women who bear the brunt of the company’s low prices,” she argues. Though comprising 72 percent of hourly employees, women make up only 34 percent of managers. No matter the position, their wages are less than those for men. Thus, she concludes, “Wal-Mart owes women: this company has built its vast profits not only on women’s drudgery, but also on their joy, creativity, and genuine care for the customer” (p. 222). Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart introduces ordinary women, many still loyal to the company, who have foregone individual settlements for the long, arduous process of a suit with the potential to benefit the universe of Wal-Mart “associates.” With deft strokes, Featherstone portrays Stephanie Odle, a single white mother and Sam Club’s assistant manager whose inadvertent discovery of a newly hired man earning $10,000 more a year for the same work initiated legal battle; lead plaintiff Betty Dukes, a middle-age African American customer-service “manager” demoted to “greeter” from the declining industrial town of Pittsburg, California whose “admiration” for firm founder Sam Walton was no compensation for mistreatment, who became the lead plaintiff; and African American Edith Arana, “a devout Christian and a devoted mother” (p. 61) attracted to the traditional values of the company, who ended up feeling “basically played” (p. 60) after being retaliated against for complaining about being denied entrance into a
WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society · 1089-7011 · Volume 8 · December 2005 · pp. 755–769 © 2005 Immanuel Ness and Blackwell Publishing Inc. 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ.
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training program. The gap between the promise of upward mobility from hard work and discriminatory experiences pushed these, two other plaintiffs, and over a hundred “class member witnesses” (p. 7) into action. “If you say you’re family oriented, you have to be about family,” Dukes told Featherstone, who in turn questions this family-friendly reputation because Wal-Mart “neither provides child care nor pays most workers enough to comfortably support families” (p. 63). Featherstone also describes the legal team and its strategy. Brad Seligman, who invested millions from earlier class-action victories to form the Berkeleybased Impact Fund, took on the fight with two other nonprofit organizations, the feminist Equal Rights Advocates and the Public Justice Center. Joining their effort were three for-profit law firms, including Tinkler & Bennett, whom Odle originally contacted. Unlike the disastrous class action suit against Sears two decades ago, this one presents real people harmed as well as damming statistical data. The company’s own reported data not only revealed fewer women in Wal-Mart management than in competitors in the same markets but also demonstrated its centralized decision making—which hampers counter claims that discrimination is the fault of just some bad bosses, “the ‘every store an island’ defense” (p. 68). Featherstone carefully explicates the case against Wal-Mart also by supplementing such documents with the women’s own testimony. Brought in June 2001, with filing for class certification nearly two years later, the U.S. District Court in San Francisco certified the class on June 22, 2004. How long the discovery process will be and when, if ever, the case will go to trial no one at this time knows. Featherstone is critical of the legal process, carefully considering drawbacks as well as possibilities. These include the drawnout process, lack of enforcement of settlement agreements especially when it comes to hiring goals and timetables, and limited institutional changes. With lawyers in control, these suits do little to “give workers more power, which is of course why Wal-Mart accepts class actions as a routine cost of doing business, but fights unions tooth and nail,” Featherstone concludes (p. 171). Thus, it will not be enough if Betty Dukes and the thousands of other women who potentially form the class gain legal redress for sex discrimination. “Wal-Mart is a low wage employer, and many of the hourly jobs will never be good ones, even if men and women get paid the same for doing them” (p. 152). Unionization represents a more appropriate tool for transforming structures of work and authority than a class action lawsuit. But unions have failed to dent this corporate culture, the tremendous loyalty instilled in employees who embrace the populist message of its founder and who identify with their customers—who are, after all, themselves: poor, working-class, without many other job prospects, whose family obligations limit their mobility and make one-stop shopping appealing—and turn this part-time job into a solution to make ends meet. With accounts of the National Organization for Women (NOW)’s Adopta-Store campaign, former Miss America Carolyn Sapp’s Women Versus WalMart, and other consumer actions, as well as United Food and Commercial Workers organizing attempts, here is a chronicle for our time. Ultimately public
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engagement as “citizens, not merely as shoppers and workers,” Featherstone contends, will be needed to take out “corporate criminals like Wal-Mart” (p. 238). Featherstone never grapples with why discrimination advances Wal-Mart’s profits. Some suggest that patriarchal roots incline the company to shore up the position of white good’ld boys. The answer could lie in the very localism that the company prides itself on. Disciplining neighbors and friends is hard; for managers to manage, moving them often helps—a strategy particularly difficult for wives and mothers. Others will have to probe more deeply Wal-Mart’s corporate practices in the context of a changing global workplace. Still, Selling Women Short is more than a good read; it is politically astute. Eileen Boris is Hull Professor of Women’s Studies and Director of the Center for Research on Women and Social Justice, University of California, Santa Barbara and writes on women’s labors in the home and workplace, with a focus on low-wage work. Her current project with Jennifer Klein examines the history of unionization in the home care industry Gordon, Suzanne. Nursing Against the Odds. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 489 pp. $29.95 (hardcover).
During the 1990s there was a serious movement to bring about a national health plan. It failed. Profit-driven health care won. To protect and maximize their profits, the health care industry raised prices and premiums, decreased health benefits and reduced reimbursements to doctors and hospitals. The number of uninsured surged. Government decried the rising costs and also cut the reimbursements paid by Medicare and Medicaid that in the past had provided a financial cushion to cover the costs of the uninsured. In various ways, government also promoted privatization, often in the form of for-profit conversions (when a nonprofit insurer or hospital becomes for-profit), which contributes to the higher costs that they decry. In response, hospitals “restructured” the health care workforce in the name of cost containment while continuing to increase administrators’ wages. Nursing was an obvious target. For the past ten years, hospital working conditions have dramatically deteriorated. Unmanageable patient loads and conflicting demands, including dangerous and family–destructive work schedules have resulted in severe stress for nurses and inferior patient care. Demoralized, exhausted, and often injured, nurses have been forced to relinquish their careers. At the same time there has been a corresponding decrease in new nurse recruits. The provision of health care now and in the future is jeopardized. The nursing shortage is real. As a health care journalist, Suzanne Gordon has spent years shadowing and interviewing nurses all over the world, studying the history of nursing, conveying research findings, and finally, presenting nursing in the context of today’s
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health care policies. Her book, Nursing Against the Odds: How Health Care, Cost Cutting, Media Stereotypes, and Medical Hubris Undermine Nurses and Patient Care presents important insights, not only to registered nurses (RNs) and those in the health care field, but to the general community, including: advocacy groups, policymakers, legislators, and very importantly, labor. The experience of reading Nursing Against the Odds was reaffirming. It is an accurate reflection of my 23 years as a Medicine/Surgical nurse, union representative and local union president, and national health care activist. To make her case, Gordon details many dimensions of the nursing shortage. In Part One, “Nurses and Doctors at Work,” Gordon presents the historical roots of nursing. During the nineteenth century, it was often nurses, mostly from religious orders, who were successful in getting hospitals established. Nurses then staffed and administered these facilities. Doctors were welcomed guests. Nurse reformers such as Florence Nightingale, emerged to improve the provision of nursing care and, therefore, the outcome of public health care. These reformers envisioned hospitals administered by women, employing women who wanted and/or needed to work. However, many physicians were alarmed at this expression of female emancipation. The pressure was on, and in the end, to ensure the survival of the nursing profession, most reformers submitted to the existing societal rules of the time and accepted the subordinate role of “ministering angel.” Gordon goes on to detail the present-day consequences of this historic submission, which effectively renders invisible the nurses’ medical and technical expertise in patient care: Nurses who openly attempt to collaborate with physicians regarding patient care intervention are often shut out and ignored. As a result, nurses early on learn skills to promote effective patient care by shrewdly making themselves intellectually imperceptible while doctors take credit for the nurses’ observations, assessment and suggested interventions. The failure of this collaborative interdisciplinary dialogue is exemplified in the patient chart. First, nurses’ notes are located in a separate section of the chart from the doctors’ notes. Second, as nurses have not been allowed to diagnose and needed to assert their independent clinical judgments and practice, the profession responded by developing nursing diagnoses/language. “Pulmonary embolus” became “alteration in tissue perfusion due to pulmonary embolus.” Taken together, nursing notes are often disregarded by physicians who cannot be bothered with wording that just does not get to the point. Because nurses are severely restricted in their ability to direct patient care, they are constantly caught in the dilemma of whether having to first ask physicians for orders on obvious interventions or moving forward and getting authorization after the intervention. In reality, if nurses called a doctor for each and every order, the system would “grind to a halt.” This is a hidden system that gives no credit to the nurse in medicine, in hospitals, and in society at
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large. The doctor gets all the credit unless, of course, there is an error or the doctor suddenly reneges on the informal protocols. As a result, nurses are regularly putting their licenses in jeopardy or setting themselves up for disciplinary action. These practices as outlined by Gordon run counter to advancing honest, respectful doctor/nurse collaboration in providing quality patient care. “The problem is that strategies for eluding or defying physician power may also keep the nurse subject to it.” Dysfunctional “noncommunication” too often results in verbal and physical abuse directed at nurses and enabling behavior patterns by nurses to placate the doctors. Gordon argues that nurses, nursing organizations, nursing academics, unions, doctors, medical societies, and hospital administrators must recognize these and many other common practices as detrimental to the provision of safe, effective health care in our communities. In Part Two, “The Media and Nursing,” Gordon discusses how difficult it is for nurses’ voices to be heard. The media may understand physicians as the “driver of volume” but fail to grasp that “nurses are in fact the engine that makes the hospital run” and not just mere “virtue workers.” Gordon also points out the ways nurses have always shied away from expressing their intellectual skills and technical expertise in public discourse: “If this legacy, and the images it has produced, aren’t overcome, nurses will not be able to argue credibly for their work. Not to journalists, not to political representatives and policy makers, and not to a public that needs to understand how cost-cutting in today’s health care system jeopardizes patients’ lives.”
In Part Three, “Hospitals and Nursing,” Gordon makes the case that administrators exploit nurses in hospitals, all the while failing to understand that the nurses’ contribution to patient care actually promotes the financial bottom line; that they need enough educated staff to observe and detect problems before or as they occur. Gordon’s comments are incisive: What does it mean to provide health care more efficiently? Not wasting money on unneeded treatment so it can be invested in expanding the pool of those cared for, or saving money and redistributing it to CEO’s? What is productivity? Enabling doctors and nurses to spend more time with patients, or getting them to see more patients? Is efficiency managing care or managing money?
An ICU nurse describes the resulting plight of both patient and nurse: This patient was dying. It was her last day on earth. I’m sure she knew she was dying and I knew she was dying too. Even though nothing would have saved her life, I had to rush off. I literally had to peel her hand off mine to be able to leave the room.
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This and numerous other examples provided by nurses explain why new and senior nurses leave their chosen careers. Yet Gordon’s book is uplifting in that it functions as a call to action. The book validates what nurses have been saying all along: that you must first retain nurses if you want to recruit nurses. In her conclusion, Gordon includes convincing rationales for staffing ratios; along with the need to better define the reality of nursing work; reconciling doctors with nurses; reasonable work schedules; the necessity of better pay; the importance of education; the centrality of unions; and the need to enact universal health care. Gordon provocatively challenges the status quo of hospital patient care. Within the health care reform movement, this book can widen the scope of strategic thinking and planning. Our health care system is massive and fragmented. Every community and local health system has a different culture and experiences varying consequences of the for-profit model. Many pathways must be followed to achieve reform. It is therefore crucial for advocates to support, respect and utilize the work of others to build and maintain the necessary infrastructure of an effective, efficient and humane health system. Nursing Against the Odds deserves a wide audience and much discussion. Present and former nurses will respond affirmatively seeing their experiences documented in the book. Reading it and discussing with co-workers, family and friends, either informally or through book clubs and study groups, may well inspire health care activism. In addition, this book begs for parallel studies and discussions regarding the work of the many other interdependent job titles that are part of the health care team. Nursing Against the Odds would be a valuable addition to nursing school curricula. Student nurses have a right to understand the reality of working in this complex system and to know the historic role of their work so they can demand better for their patients. They need to be our future activists and union members. Gordon’s index and research citations will facilitate study and reference to other health care topics. Finally, organized labor bears a threefold responsibility. First, recognizing that their members’ health care issues cannot be solved at individual bargaining tables—that our health care crisis is bigger than one employer or one industry and must be addressed on a national scale. Second, nursing is only 17 percent organized and desperately needs the advantages of democratic collective action. Unions must find ways to be more effective in helping nurses organize. Third, labor must take the time to fully understand health care issues if there is any hope of reforming our system. Who better to learn from than the workers themselves? Patty DeVinney is a registered nurse and health care reform activist. From 1982–2005 she was a union representative and officer for Nurses United, CWA Local 1168.
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Armbruster-Sandoval, Ralph. Globalization and Cross-Border Labor Solidarity in the Americas: The Anti-Sweatshop Movement and the Struggle for Social Justice. New York: Routledge, 2005. 248 pp. $25.95 (paperback). Esbenshade, Jill. Monitoring Sweatshops: Workers, Consumers, and the Global Apparel Industry. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2004. 256 pp. $22.95 (paperback).
If capitalist globalization and the rise of neoliberalism have undermined the strength of unions and altered the regulatory role of the state, what are the possibilities for promoting labor rights and countering the “race to the bottom?” In two informative, impassioned, and insightful books, sociologists Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval and Jill Esbenshade analyze some possible solutions to the problem of sweatshops in the apparel industry. Armbruster-Sandoval examines recent cross-border union organizing in the maquilas of Central America. Esbenshade analyzes the emergence and practice of nongovernmental monitoring of garment factories in the U.S. and internationally. These two books are essential reading for anyone interested in the antisweatshop movement, the apparel industry, or strategies for promoting labor rights at the point of production. Both authors are critical of “corporate social responsibility” discourse, and their analyses clarify the stark challenges of securing significant gains in an industry built on capital mobility, intense downward wage pressures, and political environments hostile to labor. Yet both are hopeful that under the right conditions and in the right combination, new strategies for organizing, monitoring, and gaining leverage may hold some potential for empowering workers in the global economy. Based on in-depth interviews, ethnographic observation, and a variety of other records, each book places its topic in historical and theoretical context and contributes to both the research literature and practical discussions of strategy. In Globalization and Cross-Border Labor Solidarity in the Americas, ArmbrusterSandoval examines four campaigns, all of which experienced some short-term successes but failed to meet their long-term objectives. The cases of PhillipsVan Heusen workers in Guatemala and the Kimi factory in Honduras at some points appeared to be major victories in which the companies were forced to recognize and bargain with strong insurgent unions. Yet both factories were shut down just as the unions were making major gains. In two other cases, the factories remained open but insurgent unions were unable to gain power or significant gains. In one of these cases—the Mandarin factory in El Salvador— solidarity campaigns led to the establishment of an innovative independent monitoring project and working conditions improved, but wages remained low. In the other—Chentex in Nicaragua—recalcitrant management ultimately dismantled a previously strong union movement and defeated a major campaign for international solidarity. The broad outlines of these cases are already somewhat familiar in labor rights circles, but Armbruster-Sandoval’s analysis is fresh, careful, and highly contextualized. The cases come alive through the narrative presentation and
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crucial issues about the historical context and sequencing of events are made clear. Given the limited variation in the cases, it is not possible to identify a single factor that determined the outcomes, but Armbruster-Sandoval does show how the campaigns were shaped by the strength and the degree of unity of both domestic and international campaigns. He situates these cases in the literature on Transnational Advocacy Networks (TANs) and demonstrates that this theoretical framework needs to pay greater attention to domestic nonstate actors, not just international advocacy organizations. Notably, the analysis illustrates how preexisting ties and divisions among labor organizations shape cross-border campaigns. For instance, these campaigns were made possible and in some cases weakened by the legacies of cold war political struggles in Central America. Progressive elements that split from the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL–CIO)’s cold war strategy in the 1980s became leaders of the international anti-sweatshop movement in the 1990s. Furthermore, some of the current disagreements about strategies in cross-border organizing are tied up with cold war-era divisions. The author shrewdly conveys these stories, but more could have been done to bring out their theoretical implications. For instance, are preexisting ties a necessary condition for the formation or success of cross-border campaigns? To what extent are TANs of different sorts built on the remnants of cold war struggles? What does this mean for cross-border organizing in different parts of the world? One shortcoming of the book is that it has little to say about the relationship between the cases. They are treated largely as four separate sequences of events, but surely there must be some dynamic learning and borrowing across campaigns. Greater attention to this issue might help us understand whether future efforts will be smarter, stronger, and more effective or face the same old barriers. It would also have been instructive to consider campaigns that never really took off or failed at the early stages, in order to better understand the conditions under which cross-border campaigns are even viable strategies. Jill Esbenshade’s Monitoring Sweatshops is a powerful indictment of private monitoring in the apparel industry, which is argued to be paternalistic and disempowering of workers. Esbenshade charts the emergence of monitoring in the apparel industry in the 1990s, arguing that it reflects a shift from the postwar social contract to an emerging “social accountability contract.” Whereas the social contract involved bargaining between capital, labor, and the state, the “social accountability contract” is an implicit agreement between manufacturers, contractors, governments, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that largely excludes workers and privileges consumers. This arrangement emphasizes corporate accountability for workers rather than accountability to workers/citizens. Esbenshade bases much of the argument on the domestic apparel industry, where monitoring first arose, but also analyzes the rise of international monitoring and the formation of monitoring associations like the Fair Labor
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Association and the Worker Rights Consortium’s challenge to the standard monitoring model. Private monitoring arose as a way for the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) to off-load inspection of compliance with wage and hour laws. In the California apparel industry, monitoring firms (often headed by former DOL inspectors or garment industry managers) quickly emerged and began performing thousands of inspections per year. Esbenshade is one of the first to paint a detailed portrait of this industry—and it is by and large not a pretty picture. She argues that monitors are often compromised by their status as paid agents of the manufacturer or contractor, having underqualified staff members, and a sidestepping of the root causes of labor violations (especially price pressures). An analysis of DOL data shows that though monitored factories are less likely than unmonitored factories to violate labor laws, rates of compliance are still dismally low. Even among “effectively monitored” shops, more than half were out of compliance in 2000. Esbenshade contrasts “private monitoring” done by compliance firms for a corporate client with “independent monitoring” by NGOs and local civil society groups. Though the author suggests that even independent monitors sometimes struggle with paternalism (and the danger of becoming substitutes for unions), she argues that this form of monitoring has some potential to support rather than undermine the empowerment of workers. This book has a great deal of insight and information for scholars, activists, and those who, like Esbenshade, combine these two pursuits. However, it raises a few issues that deserve more analysis. For instance, the distinction between “private” and “independent” monitoring is a bit blurry, as both are formally private and what appears to make a monitor “independent” in this framework is really an organization’s nonprofit status and activist credentials. In addition, while monitoring is certainly paternalistic in comparison to grassroots unionization, it is not clear if it is more paternalistic than the government enforcement systems it was created to supplement (or perhaps replace). Though we get a great deal of insight into the skills, training, and practices of private monitors, it would be interesting to be able to compare this to government labor inspectors to see whether the rise of such monitoring truly produces a degradation of enforcement capacity or is just a shift of enforcement from public to private actors (which is troubling in its own right, but for different reasons). The analysis of compliance rates for monitored and unmonitored firms could also have done more to assess whether monitoring has real effects or whether better-performing firms have chosen to engage in monitoring. Overall, these books make important contributions to the struggle against sweatshops and to research on innovative campaign strategies and regulatory practices. The authors have produced empirical findings and theoretical insights that will surely shape future debates on labor rights in the global economy. Tim Bartley is an assistant professor at the Department of Sociology, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN.
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Aronowitz, Stanley. How Class Works: Power and Social Movement. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. 263 pp. $17 (paperback).
Periodic pronouncements that class analysis is irrelevant to understanding our society remind me of the old joke that the dirty words that should not be spoken are four letters long, except in the academia where they are five letters long—words like class, labor, and power. Indeed, many mainstream social scientists eschew the analytical usage of these five-letter words unless they are bent on proving their irrelevance to understanding contemporary social relations. No sooner did sociologist Daniel Bell proclaim the “end of ideology” in the early 1960s than numerous social movements percolated up from the grass roots to challenge the status quo on issues such as civil rights, women’s rights, democratizing the labor movement, occupational safety and health protection, environmental protection, gay rights and poor people’s rights, among others. With the decline of the bilateral Cold War paradigm and the resurgence of the free market ideology, conservatives tried once again to relegate class analysis to the dustbin of history. For Francis Fukuyama, the end of the Cold War represented the fulfillment of the Hegelian “end of history”; Marxian analysis of class struggle would be replaced by sociological descriptions of class stratification. Postmodernists, who favored identity politics, also dismissed the centrality of class. What neoliberals and postmodernists overlook is the enormous role that capitalism plays in shaping the lives of working people; it produces inequality as surely as it produces profits. While most Americans believe themselves to be members of the middle class the reality is that many are one layoff away from bankruptcy. Our political culture emphasizes individualism, opportunity, Horatio Alger-like rags-to-riches stories, and the American Dream, but the centrality of class cannot be ignored. The Bush administration and the Republican-controlled congress made it harder for the average American to file for bankruptcy, but gave corporations and the wealthy enormous tax breaks, subsidies, and no-bid contracts which further exacerbate the divide between the rich and the poor, the largest gap in any industrialized democracy. Millions of Americans are denied a decent education, jobs that pay a living wage, comprehensive health care, affordable housing and pension. The neoliberal embrace of free markets has resulted in a global race to the bottom and the loss of thousands of jobs that once paid a living wage. The decline of class mobility has grown to the point that it even attracted the attention of the mainstream press; the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal have recently run stories on the subject. In How Class Works, Stanley Aronowitz, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Urban Education at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, adapts class analysis to the characteristics of our postindustrial society. He is the author or editor of many works, including False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness and From the Ashes of the Old: American Labor and America’s Future. While Aronowitz utilizes class analysis he departs
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from the classic Marxist paradigm. In our postindustrial economy, what it means to be working class has shifted from the traditional, essentialist emphasis on a material definition to one that is more pluralistic and shaped by political and cultural influences as well as economic factors. Aronowitz makes a distinction between those who are content to describe the degrees of class stratification in our society and those who analyze the potential for class conflict. He sees the labor movement as guided by the former while it desperately needs the vision of the latter. Aronowitz argues that social conditions in late postindustrial society have changed to the extent that it no longer makes sense to speak of class conflict strictly in terms of labor/capital relations in the classical Marxian paradigm. Nor does he embrace the postmodernists who dismiss class analysis as little more than part of the narrative that people tell one another as they socially construct reality. Historicity, the idea that social relations at any given time can best be understood as a process whereby social conflict amongst class fractions takes new forms during different periods of history, must be taken into account. For Aronowitz class lines appear anywhere social groups, or class fractions, are able and willing, to challenge the ruling elite and alter the balance of social relations in their favor. Aronowitz describes four major changes that have arisen to challenge classical Marxism’s assumptions about class relations. First, the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and China’s embrace of capitalism have been cited by many critics as proof of Marxism’s failure. Aronowitz rejects such facile analyses as these one-party dictatorships never adhered to Marx’s call for the establishment of workers’ control and the withering away of the state apparatus. Still, he calls for a reexamination of the assumptions underlying classical Marxist conceptions of class. Second, Marx and Engels thought that the class struggle would boil down to two classes, capital and labor. Other intermediate classes like artisans and small farmers would not survive, but small businesses, despite a 90 percent failure rate, still fill an important economic niche. Another development that Marx could not foresee was, as Thorstein Veblen astutely observed, the creation of a new class of salaried managers and technical engineers. The third factor was the rise of the consumer culture fueled by access to easy credit during the post-World War II years. Add to this the safety net provided by New Deal social welfare programs, the GI Bill, and higher union wages, which allowed some class mobility and had the effect of softening the hard edges of class stratification. Fourth, the development of the postindustrial economy, based on low wage, deskilled workers, routinized work, technological innovation, and computer automation raises the greatest challenge to traditional assumptions about class. Today much of the work done by doctors, lawyers and engineers, not just call center operators, is being outsourced to India. During his reelection campaign Bush talked about the importance of creating American jobs, but the Republican Party found it cheaper to outsource the job of making its fund-raising calls to India. Consequently, Aronowitz’s treatment of how class works departs from the classical Marxist perspective in several respects. First, the struggle for power is
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not confined at the point of production; it includes the power of social groups to alter the balance of social relations in their favor. Aronowitz broadens the concept of the power elite beyond the classical Marxist formulation of those who control the means of production to include what he calls the “social rule,” a combination of the nation’s capitalist and political elite. The exact composition of this power bloc changes depending on the specific historical period and the issue being contested. Moreover, the gap between workers and other social movements is historical, not permanent. The gap can be bridged in the sense that women can be agents for social change in their roles as workers, mothers, or feminists. Labor, environmentalists, blacks, feminists, and anti-AIDS activists are examples of social groups from different economic and social groupings that have challenged and changed the status quo. They are on one side of the power divide while the power bloc, whose composition varies with the issue at hand, is on the other side. Finally, he says, “I do not conclude that class formation and class struggle no longer constitute history if the outcome is not revolution and the appearance of a new mode of production” (p. 11). He argues that revolution and new mode of production are not necessary; “class occurs when insurgent social formation(s) make demands that cleave society and engender new social and cultural relations” (p. 11). Aronowitz believes that the labor movement made a Faustian bargain with capital when it agreed to accept the right to organize and collective bargaining within the legal framework of the National Labor Relations Act (1935). Better known as the Wagner Act, it granted organized labor a place at the power bloc’s table, raises and benefits, and insured labor peace. The American Federation of Labor’s William Green called the Wagner Act “labor’s Magna Charta,” (p. 80), but Aronowitz sees it as a mistake because organized labor lost a chance to engage in class formation; it was also obliged to abide by the rules laid down by the power elite. After a wave of aggressive strikes to gain wage increases and benefits denied to workers during World War II, the power elite further limited labor’s room to maneuver with the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947. The rise of anti-communism during the Cold War pressured the labor movement to purge its radical members. Over time the labor movement turned into an ossified bureaucracy led by labor aristocrats who seemed to have more in common with management than their rank-and-file members. Unions like the pacesetting United Automobile Workers and United Steelworkers signed no-strike contracts that turned them into enforcers of labor discipline when their members went on wildcat strikes. Aronowitz concludes that collective bargaining degenerated into “collective begging” (p. 161). Yet another chance for class formation was lost during the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization strike in 1981 when, instead of calling a oneday general strike or marching on to Washington, the AFL and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL–CIO) unsuccessfully pleaded with President Reagan to let the workers return. Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers was the signal from the top that the already escalating corporate war on labor and the welfare state had the state’s official blessing. By this time labor leaders
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lacked a class-based frame of reference for responding to corporate demands for wage and benefit givebacks, and the wave of plant closings sweeping the rust belt continued as capital moved production to lower wage locales. This is the 70th anniversary of the Wagner Act, but it has not prevented union membership from declining to its lowest levels since the 1920s. Some unions, led by Andrew Stern’s Service Employees International Union, favor more aggressive and innovative efforts to organize new workers. Perhaps books like How Class Works will help to frame the debate within the labor movement as to whether it retains the business-as-usual approach, or reaches out to those who it has long ignored and attempts to engage in class formation. Vernon Mogensen is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the Kingsborough Community College, City University of New York. He is also the editor of Worker Safety Under Siege: Labor, Capital and the Politics of Workplace Safety in a Deregulated World, M.E. Sharpe, 2005. Bender, Daniel E. Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Language of Labor. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. 272 pp. $23.95 (paperback).
By now it is perhaps a bit clichéd to damn present-minded history by observing that, though all history exhibits some elements of the historian’s own predilections, to write of the past with the deliberate aim of gleaning lessons for modern day actors invites anachronism. On one level, Daniel Bender’s new book on the first anti-sweatshop campaign is an exercise in historical didacticism, but to dwell on such shortcomings distracts from his considerable accomplishments with this work. The story he tells of the ways in which garment workers’ and reformers’ views of the sweatshop evolved “in the context of . . . assumptions of difference and the realities of inequality” is a compelling one that imaginatively “links the cultural and social histories of the turn of the twentieth century,” just as Bender intends (p. 17). Juggling an array of sources authored by actors with competing ideas and purposes, Bender somehow lays out a clear narrative of the major shifts in and debates over anti-sweatshop language. In contrast to previous historians, he finds that workers and reformers “shared anxieties about the dangers of work, immigration, and industrialization” (p. 14). Changes in the garment industry in the 1880s brought these anxieties into sharp focus. A combination of conditions—the massive migration of Eastern European Jews (many of whom were experienced in garment-work), the introduction of the cutting knife and sewing machine, reorganized production, and the demand for “ready-to-wear” clothing—gave rise to a ruthlessly competitive environment that favored the contracting-out of work to smaller shops. For workers this process brought falling wages, a longer working day, and the growth of homework. Well into the early twentieth century, workers’ and reformers’ views of the crisis clashed.
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Worried outside observers saw the sweatshop as symptomatic of the Jews’ perceived inferior racial characteristics, while sweatshop workers, most of whom were Eastern European Jews, blamed capitalism. What these different critics eventually realized is that they had in common a gender-based fear of the sweatshop—that it endangered the health and job security of the male breadwinner and therefore a gender norm that was crucial to the assimilation of “new” Jewish immigrants. The 1910 cloakmakers’ victory facilitated an alliance between reformers and workers that culminated in the creation of the Joint Board of Sanitary Control ( JBSC), a body responsible for significantly reducing the incidence of homework (among Jews, not Italians, Bender notes) and imposing sanitary standards on the industry. The activism of female workers in this coalition grew with the 1909 and 1913 strikes, particularly via the cross-class Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL). The WTUL’s insistence that female workers were victims of the sweatshop and respectable working-women (“ladies”) opened the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) to women and brought the power of the JBSC to bear in female-dominated as well as maledominated shops and trades. However, JBSC and ILGWU policies and the “manly” culture of work in the industry reflected the dominant belief in sexual difference among the alliance’s men and women. Dissident female unionists eventually unleashed their frustrations, especially against the ILGWU’s maledominated leadership, by initiating a Communist rebellion within the union that “eventually led to the demise of the JBSC and the anti-sweatshop coalition” (p. 18) by the late 1920s. The factional battles also brought male unionists to the fore, pushed women once again into the background, and encouraged the rebirth of the sweatshop. Bender’s reliance upon discourse analysis reminds me of a professor of mine, who once asked my graduate class, if one boards the Linguistic Turn train, is it intellectually possible to disembark at some point, or, once on, is one committed to the entire journey? Bender so skillfully interprets the cultural and political messages in the documents and images that workers and reformers produced that it is tempting to remain on the train. He powerfully conveys, with sweatshop workers’ poetry, art, and autobiographies, the early class critique that emphasized the sweatshop’s physical costs, particularly the high incidence of tuberculosis. His analyses of photographs contrasting Lower East Side tenement shops with “model shops,” union discussions of how to best cure the debilitating effects of sweatshop work, and female workers’ testimonies concerning sexual harassment convincingly make the case that opponents of the sweatshop at once discounted and feared the reality of women’s growing presence in the industry. In Clara Lemlich’s oft-quoted speech that ignited the 1909 strike, he finds a subtle appeal to male workers and unionists who regarded women as outside the labor movement. Finally, he brilliantly reads female unionists’ Communist attack on the ILGWU leadership as a gender rebellion. But on the whole, his reading of various sources suggests that Jewish immigrant women workers and unionists generally accepted or worked within gendered hierarchies of pay and skill, the much greater attention that the union and the JBSC gave
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to male workers’ health, and the assumption that married female workers had no place in the world of waged work. Bender’s sympathies are with the dissidents. His hope is that “the image of Jewish female unionists in 1930 once again calling out for real inclusion in the ILGWU can serve as a historical reminder” for the current anti-sweatshop campaign (p. 196). Indeed, the epilogue draws a number of political lessons from the history of the first anti-sweatshop campaign for present-day anti-sweatshop organizing. The thrust of his argument is that “the burden of language” prevented workers and their allies from choosing more radical paths (p. 16). However, the paths Bender has in mind are more in line with modern-day feminism and opposition to capitalism and “new-liberal globalization” than relevant to his subjects’ time and place. Anti-sweatshop organizers can profit from a history that suggests that to focus on sweatshops ignores the inequalities and exploitation of clean but low-paid workplaces. But Bender does not explain why the first campaign remained, in his eyes, so linguistically straight-jacketed. Were other possibilities really available? How would a class-based revolt resolve the problem? That said, despite his lapses into “what-might-have-been,” Bender offers scholars a solid grounding in the discursive history of a movement that for a time dramatically improved conditions in the garment industry. It is a foundation upon which future historians of a more historicist bent can build. Theresa Case is an Assistant Professor of History at University of HoustonDowntown and specializes in nineteenth-century labor history.
