#nelson lichtenstein

[dontfightyourwaralone]

The California academic strike is the most important in US higher education history | Nelson Lichtenstein

The University of California is trying to divide and conquer the 48,000 workers on strike by acceding to the demands of some groups but not

[isomorphismes]

Did a “labour-management accord” resolve the labour question in the prosperous years after the end of World War II? … Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s first secretary of labour, spent much of his tenure jawboning corporations to live up to their side of this presumptive accord. But the very idea of … a harmonious accord [between capital and labour] is a suspect reinterpretation of the postwar industrial era. Phrases like “social compact”, “social contract”, and “labour-capital accord” wre first deployed in the early 1980’s by liberals … to condemn wage cuts … and define what they seemed to be losing in Reagan’s America. The terminology of social peace … was … absent from the language of either labour or management during the 1950’s and 1960’s. During the [early postwar era] few unionists [would] have declared their relationship with corporate America particularly agreeable or stable. Most would have thought the very idea of a “social compact” … a clever piece of management propaganda.

Nelson Lichtenstein, state of the union

[weil-weil-lautre]

Nostalgia Trap - Episode 77: Nelson Lichtenstein

[weil-weil-lautre]

The declining reputation of the unions, the decay of industrial pluralism, and the rise of a new discourse of individual rights soon had its impact on the legal status and meaning of the trade-union idea. Labor's reliance upon the procedural mechanisms adjudicated by the NLRB, designed to generate a pluralistic industrial democracy at the work site, came to seem far less potent and universal than the rights discourse generated by the state's conception of substantive justice and equal protection under the law. Rights claims, moreover, arose out of the moral fervor of the African American freedom struggle, and they were soon associated with a new politics of multicultural diversity, feminism, and gay liberation. By advocating state protection as opposed to collective action, American liberals implicitly endorsed the idea, long associated with anti-union conservatism, that the labor movement could not be trusted to protect the individual rights of its members or of workers in general. Only the state and its regulatory apparatus could safeguard the individual from social ills: not only racial and gender discrimination, but also unresponsive bureaucracies in the factory and office.

Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union, 171

[weil-weil-lautre]

How the Ivy League Collaborates with Donald Trump | Dissent Magazine

Top university officials at Columbia and Yale have found in Trump an ally in their longstanding efforts to resist graduate employees’ efforts to unionize.

[weil-weil-lautre]

How can we explain this abrupt shift in outlook? Many will point to McCarthyism, but the anti-Communist purges that destroyed the CIO left wing proved but a small part of the answer. For those intellectuals and writers oriented toward the Communist Party, the wrong unionists won office and the progressives were purged from labor's ranks, thus opening the door to a social and foreign-policy bargain that emasculated the unions, ensured the dominance of capital, and advanced the interests of the Cold War state. Despite their ostensible class analysis, commentators in or close to the Communist Party tended to see trade-union leadership as almost entirely a question of an individual's ideology and career development.

Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union, 159.

[weil-weil-lautre]

Nelson Lichtenstein - The "Fissured Workplace" and Fate of the Working Class

[coverspy]

Labor’s War at Home, Nelson Lichtenstein (M, 30s, brown hair, blue tee, black messenger bag, E train)