Which Direction For Organized Labor

Which Direction for Organized Labor? addresses critical questions facing the U.S. labor movements as it approaches the twenty-first century.

The thrilling and true account of racketeering and union corruption in mid-century New York, when unions and the mob were locked in a power struggle that reverberates to this day In 1949, in New York City's crowded Garment District, a union organizer named William Lurye was stabbed to death by a mob assassin. Through the lens of this murder case, prize-winning authors David Witwer and Catherine Rios explore American labor history at its critical turning point, drawing on FBI case files and the private papers of investigative journalists who first broke the story. A narrative that originates in the garment industry of mid-century New York, which produced over 80 percent of the nation's dresses at the time, Murder in the Garment District quickly moves to a national stage, where congressional anti-corruption hearings gripped the nation and forever tainted the reputation of American unions. Replete with elements of a true-crime thriller, Murder in the Garment District includes a riveting cast of characters, from wheeling and dealing union president David Dubinsky to the notorious gangster Abe Chait and the crusading Robert F. Kennedy, whose public duel with Jimmy Hoffa became front-page news. Deeply researched and grounded in the street-level events that put people's lives and livelihoods at stake, Murder in the Garment District is destined to become a classic work of history—one that also explains the current troubled state of unions in America.

How can American unions survive in our increasingly globalized business environment? With the trend toward multinational corporations, free trade pacts, and dismantling import barriers, organized labor has been steadily losing ground in the United States. This book argues that to reverse this trend, U.S. unions must create ties with workers and unions in other countries, and include the ever-increasing number of immigrant workers in their ranks. And it calls for a shift toward "social movement unionism, " which would change unions' orientation from exclusively market-focused and more toward social issues and rights.

Chronicles the birth pangs of a typically anarcho-syndicalist movement of the early Latin American genre and its subsequent metamorphosis into a domesticated West Indian version of North American-style business unionism.

The US trade union movement finds itself on a global battlefield filled with landmines and littered with the bodies of various social movements and struggles. Candid, incisive, and accessible, this text is a critical examination of labour's crisis and a plan for a bold way forward into the 21st century.