Remembering labor.

FROM THE FOLKS WHO BROUGHT YOU THE WEEKEND By Priscilla Murolo, A.B. Chitty, and Joe Sacco. New Press, 2003.

Two, maybe three times in the last seven years, union organizers with whom I have put together strike support, a membership drive, and an organizing effort have offered me copies of Labor's Untold Story, a classic book originally published in 1955. It is narrow and generally dry labor union history, burdened with excessive detail about the internal operations of unions. If From the People Who Brought You the Weekend replaces that volume in the hands of unionists I know and work with, Priscilla Murolo and A.B. Chitty's substantial effort to synthesize current labor and working class historiography would be a success. One of the expressed goals of the book is to help inform the rank-and-file implementing the "New Voice" unionism by--to paraphrase John Sweeney--doing better the things unions have done best. As a result this is a high-quality movement book with a moderate tone and a keen but not overwhelming interest in the data and stories of labor and working class history. The authors have included a comprehensive index and a glossary to guide readers through the plethora of acronyms in contemporary unionism (TUEL, CIO, UMW, IWW, UE, NWRO, PAW). But its features that most contrast it from older syntheses are its emphasis on "union democracy," "bottom-up" approach to historical developments, and a broad view of the working class community as the context for the development of movements. The more democratic features of the American Revolution, emancipation in the Civil War, the New Deal, and the democratic movement within American unionism itself are all substantially attributed to the efforts, demands, and organizing of ordinary men and women, immigrant and native, enslaved and free.

But From the People Who Brought You the Weekend is more than a movement book. It will be useful for undergraduates, teachers, non-specialist professors, and high school students as well. The authors do a fine job using information from specialized studies to offer new impressions of well-known figures and events. Of the thousands of African-Americans who entered the U.S. Armed Forces in the Civil War, approximately 72 percent had been slaves in 1860 (88). William Lloyd Garrison--the ardent abolitionist--attacked unionism as a "pernicious doctrine" regarding the "opulent as the natural enemies of the laboring classes." (73) And the Seneca Falls Conference of 1848 included Charlotte Woodward, a seamstress who had been barred from learning the typesetting trade. Woodward was a signer of the famous Declaration of Sentiments. The volume is particularly strong in integrating the aspirations and defeats of women and African Americans in the labor movement, though quite a bit weaker in assessing homosexual working class cultures.

All of the general information found in textbooks such as Who Built America? can also be found here. Murolo and Chitty place the desire for labor and commodities at the center of post-1492 colonialism in the Americas. The text often offers figures on union membership, broken down by demographic groups. And indentured servitude, early industrialization, slavery versus free labor, worker's parties, the Knights of Labor, dual-unionism, craft versus industrial unionism, the Great Upheaval of 1877, Taylorism, the Cold War labor-corporate-government accord, and other important topics are treated.

Undoubtedly specialist researchers will object to elements of the narrative, theory, and method implicit in the book. It uses cartoons by the political cartoonist Joe Sacco, for example, instead of period illustrations and documents. It has no citations (though it does have a very useful list of suggested readings). And despite the effort to focus broadly, the book still reads at times as a history of national politics and internal union struggles, especially in the late chapters on the Reagan Era and the Post-Cold War 1990s. Community labor solidarity organizations, such as Jobs with Justice and ACORN, for example, are hardly mentioned, though what is said clearly suggests their importance. It is puzzling that we learn much about Democratic Party candidates, nominations, and developments, and little about the Highlander Folk School or the worker education movement. Living wage campaigns, perhaps the most dynamic, diverse, and widespread solidarity movements of recent years, are not mentioned.

From the People Who Brought You the Weekend aspires to be a broad, narrative, easily read history of labor and working class life in America from 1492 to the present in 332 pages. Finding objections is too easy. Radical teachers, historians, unionists, and solidarity organizers need resources for building an anti-sexist, anti-racist, anti-homophobic, and democratic labor movement. This book is such a resource partly because it shows that--at the "grassroots"--such a movement already exists and has existed for a long time in some quarters. Murolo and Chitty have authored an excellent introduction to the field of labor history, the union movement, and working class cultures.