Labor Pains: Inside America's New Union Movement.

LABOR PAINS: INSIDE AMERICA'S NEW UNION MOVEMENT

by Suzan Erem. Monthly Review Press, 2001.

Suzan Erem's passionate voice recounts the highs and lows of participating in organizing union movements today. Labor Pains is a moving personal account of one organizer's perspective on the development of the changing face of the union movement in America. The stepping-off point for her account is the story of United Armor, which serves as both the prologue and epilogue tale; victory and the creation of a union within an industry are not necessarily indicative of change on the job site, as the United Armor example indicates.

Labor Pains succeeds in providing the personal experiences that make up the overall union struggle. For example, Erem recounts personal conversations with hospital workers and administrators, as well as contract negotiations, media attention-getting stunts, and morale-boosters for her union reps on the job. The short chapters and narrative style allow for an easy read which would make this book an excellent addition to an undergraduate or upper high school level course dealing with labor history. Personal stories ground the book, bringing theory down to earth and literally giving it a face. Erem crosses class, gender, political, and racial boundaries, with a particular emphasis on the latter, and demonstrates the continual negotiation of these categories by both the workers and the organizers. Labor Pains is punctuated with Erem's insights on these categories, such as, "More and more it became clear to me that to them [the workers] the union was simply a vehicle for civil rights, not for black and white unity so we could all live better."

Erem also pays particular attention to the experience and number of female organizers within the labor system despite the dominance of men within the union movement. This makes Labor Pains not simply the stories of "invisible people" but the personal situations and struggle of those in the shadow of the worker, those fighting to organize and create a beneficial labor structure for the worker.

At its best, Labor Pains is an autobiographical account, a personal history, and a primary source that draws from Erem's firsthand recollections of labor unions in Chicago, New Jersey and Iowa, among other locations. Although the book tends to lean toward the benefits of unions and organizing, it also recognizes those workers who do not feel the need to unionize or find detriment to their careers by organizing.

The only shortcoming of the book comes when Erem neglects to tackle the matter of those who do not organize. Many of the workers' tales confront the question, "What happens if we join the union?" "What are the benefits of joining a union?" is also adequately treated in the book. However, there are workers who ask, "What happens if we do not form a union?" and some of the attempts to organize workers in the book do fail. Erem never fully addresses those who do not organize; she misses the opportunity to explore their reasoning and plumb the depths of what their stories contain.