Hope for beleaguered labor movement

State of the Unions: How Labor Can Strengthen the Middle Class, Improve our Economy and Regain Political Influence
by Philip Dine
McGraw-Hill, $27.95

When chronicling the decades-long decline of organized labor in the United States, commentators have often examined the dwindling role of unions in troubled industries such as cars and coal. Few consider the more hopeful case of the catfish industry.

In "State of the Unions: How Labor Can Strengthen the Middle Class, Improve our Economy and Regain Political Influence," Philip Dine chronicles the unlikely gains made by organizers in the booming business of farming catfish in the Mississippi Delta.

The anecdote from a little-known business is part of Dine's playbook for a comeback for organized labor at a time when many are ready to write the movement off as irrelevant and outdated.

Dine, a 20-year veteran of the labor beat at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, counters that labor's message and values could still resonate with the nine out of 10 Americans who don't belong to a union - if the movement can reinvent itself.

As examples of the new style of leadership required to do that, Dine cites union wins for catfish workers in Mississippi and the grass-roots organizing success of Iowa firefighters in winning that state's 2004 presidential caucus for John Kerry.

But he also details a broad picture for the union side that is both familiar and bleak.

The percentage of unionized US workers has dropped from over 35 percent in the 1950s to less than 8 percent today.

Outsourcing and offshoring have eroded the power of collective bargaining. And labor's political power is on the wane, as witnessed by the 2004 presidential election, when union efforts failed to unseat President George W. Bush, a figure many trade unionists consider to be the most antilabor president in history.

The stakes, Dine contends, are high for the millions of Americans hoping to rise into the middle class or in danger of falling out of it.

"Living wages, enforcement of health and safety regulations, the retention of good jobs in this country, pensions earned during a lifetime of work - these and more are seriously threatened," Dine writes.

As one example of how labor can get its groove back, Dine examines the catfish industry - as well as local organizers who employed creative tactics to take their story to the broader public and enlist support for their cause.

By 1991, a Mississippi-based company called Delta Pride controlled more than 40 percent of the market for pond-raised catfish - a $2 billion industry rapidly replacing cotton as a major employer in the state.

But the company's 1,200 workers complained of low pay, unhealthy work conditions, and work rules that limited them to six bathroom breaks a week.

Organized by the United Food and Commercial Workers, employees walked out and won a contract that raised base pay by 20 percent, added new premiums for skilled work, and set up a labor-management safety committee.

The key, Dine writes, was that organizers rallied strong public support by putting the spotlight on the workers, many of them single mothers and former cotton workers.

Supermarket boycotts organized in Atlanta, Detroit, St. Louis, and Houston pressured company negotiators, and rallies with veterans from the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s turned the strike into "a quasi-spiritual undertaking," Dine writes.

But he also concedes the gains are an anomaly.

"If this triumph shows what labor can accomplish by maximizing union and worker strengths and capturing the public imagination, it is nonetheless an exception in a growing tide of union ineptitude that has concrete consequences for workers, union or not," Dine writes.