I recently came across an article in the United Mine Workers Journal denouncing the management bias of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and calling for labor law reform. Here’s how it described the workers’ rights violations that cry out for new legal remedies:

As the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) has been weakened over the years by the presidential appointment of conservatives to the NLRB, coal operators and companies in other industries have returned to the traditional weapons of anti-union employers. With increasing frequency, they are discharging or laying off union supporters, blacklisting them, making threatening speeches, engaging in other conduct designed to prevent fair representation elections, and then refusing to bargain in good faith when unions win these elections. And the Board is letting them get away with it. [1]

The UMW Journal goes on to demand immediate “legal and policy changes” – including a requirement that the NLRB “certify new unions and order employers to bargain with them on the basis of signed authorization cards showing clear majority support within an appropriate bargaining unit.”

In addition, labor law violators should face heavier financial penalties and federal court injunctions that would “put workers dismissed for union activity back to work while the NLRB is investigating and processing charges filed on their behalf.”

Unfortunately, this was not a recent story in the Journal. It was written (by me) in 1975, when a quarter of the U.S. workforce was unionized and the UMW could still shutdown much of the coal industry. My article was part of a broader membership education and publicity effort. Unions, at that time, were trying to lay the groundwork for a grassroots campaign for labor law reform when the Democratic Party regained control of the presidency in 1976, after its big (Watergate-related) victories in mid-term Congressional elections in 1974.

With help from labor, Jimmy Carter defeated Republican Gerald Ford less than a year after the article quoted above was sent to the homes of 225,000 active and retired coal miners. (Today, the UMW has only 86,000 members.) In 1978, during Carter’s first and only term, unions came closer to strengthening the Wagner Act (NLRA) than at any other time since Congress enacted labor’s “Magna Carta” in 1935. An AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations) -backed bill that would have speeded up representation votes, helped fired organizers, and penalized union-busting employers got filibustered to death in the Senate, after tepid White House lobbying on its behalf.

On the 30th anniversary of that set-back – and partly because of it – American unions now represent only 12.1 percent of the total workforce. In the NLRA-covered private sector, union density is down to 7.5%. However, as part of the popular backlash against another discredited GOP administration, mid-term elections two years ago have changed the composition of Congress for the better, and raised new hopes for labor law reform. In 2008, union members are once again being urged to elect big Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, plus a new president – so legislation called the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), described in more detail below, can be enacted early next year. [2]

At this important juncture – when amending the NLRA is even more essential to union survival than three decades ago – it’s worth examining the current labor-community campaign for EFCA. Are the lessons of past political defeats being applied in this renewed bid for labor law reform? Can the AFL-CIO – and its Change to Win (CTW) rival – join forces to win NLRA changes despite organized labor’s loss of density and political clout since the late 1970s? Even if enacted, will EFCA be able to remedy widespread employer rejection of collective bargaining?

EFCA-Round 1

In a dress rehearsal for workers’ rights lobbying next year, organized labor forced a House vote on EFCA in 2007, even though the bill lacked a filibuster-proof “super-majority” in the Senate and President Bush would have vetoed it anyway. At hearings, rallies, and press conferences around the country, union officials and fired workers explained how EFCA would make a difference in union organizing and first contract bargaining. Unlike now, management would be compelled to recognize new bargaining units based on a showing that a majority of workers (in an appropriate unit) had signed union authorization cards. Employers would no longer be able to insist on NLRB elections, with their accompanying delays and opportunities for legal (and illegal) anti-union campaigning. Workers fired for organizing would be eligible for “treble damages” – three times their lost pay–rather than just “back pay” minus “interim earnings.” Other employer unfair labor practices – now “punished” with a mere notice posting – could result in a $20,000 fine (if found to be willful or repeated violations of the Act). Finally, EFCA would create a Canadian-style process of first contract mediation and arbitration. Unresolved first contract negotiations could, at union request, become the subject of binding arbitration leading to imposed contract terms. This would make it harder for employers to use bad faith bargaining as their second line of defense against unionization – as many do after losing a contested representation election.

EFCA opponents launched a well-coordinated drive against the bill – in a dry run of the even bigger management counter-campaign anticipated next year. In op-eds, paid ads, anti-EFCA mailings, speeches, and websites, industry lobbyists defended the sanctity of secret-ballot NLRB representation votes, depicting labor’s “card check” alternative as deeply flawed, undemocratic, and even “un-American.” The result was a 241 to 185 House vote in favor of EFCA in March, 2007. Three months later, 51 members of the Senate moved to bring it to a vote on the floor – far fewer than the 60 necessary to stop a Republican filibuster. Meanwhile, during this year’s presidential race, every would-be Democratic nominee endorsed the bill – although only John Edwards ever talked much about EFCA in front of non-labor audiences. [3] While pursuing the “labor vote” (unsuccessfully) during the Ohio primary last March, Barack Obama told a blue-collar crowd in Lorain:

If a majority of workers want a union, they should get a union. It’s that simple. We need to stand up to the business lobby and pass the Employee Free Choice Act. That’s why I’ve been fighting for it in the Senate and that’s why I’ll make it the law of the land when I’m president of the United States. [4]

Obama’s then-rival, Hillary Clinton, also pledged her support for EFCA (although in a private meeting with top AFL-CIO officials in 2007 she suggested – somewhat gratuitously given her own “high negatives” – that labor’s poor public image might be an impediment to its passage). As a would-be standard bearer for labor law reform, Clinton bore the taint of her husband’s own dismal record. Fourteen years after Carter’s failed attempt to amend the Wagner Act, Bill Clinton took office and immediately put labor’s top legislative priority on the back burner by ordering a study. (As Clinton’s Secretary of Labor Robert Reich explained at the time: “The jury is still out on whether the traditional union is necessary for the new workplace.”) Headed by Harvard professor John Dunlop, Clinton’s “Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations” spent 1993-4 collecting testimony and trying to document links between “employee representation” and “economic competitiveness.” Unfortunately for labor, this two-year period was the only time when the Democrats had a majority in both the House and Senate – and, thus, the ability to enact pro-worker legislation. Dunlop Commission proposals, some of which were not even helpful to unions, ended up being dead on arrival due to mid-term election victories in 1994 that gave Republicans control over Congress for the rest of Clinton’s presidency.

Lessons of the Past

Having learned from that fiasco, labor law reformers today hope that their preparatory activity in 2007 and continued agitation about EFCA during the 2008 presidential race will keep sufficient pressure on the Democrats to bring EFCA to a vote early in Obama’s administration (if he’s elected). House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democratic Majority Leader George Miller are viewed as key union allies – committed to pushing the White House forward on the issue without any Clinton-style commissions, delay, or political “triangulation.” But not all of their colleagues – old or new – may be as reliable as the House leadership. In an election year message to members of the United Electrical Workers, UE’s national political director Chris Townsend warned “against political phonies who want us to think they are in support of EFCA but who will get cold feet when big business lobbyists (and campaign contributors) lean on them hard when the bill comes before Congress again.” [5] The 2007 House and Senate roll-calls were an important stepping stone to labor law reform – but, in terms of outcome, they were votes that “didn’t count.” Everyone involved knew the EFCA couldn’t become law this time around, thus making it possible for labor’s more lukewarm Congressional “friends” to take a “pro-union” stand of no actual consequence.

In addition to their presidential campaigning in 2008, private sector unions are focusing this year on shoring up the shakier Democrats in the Senate and trying to insure that any Democratic Senatorial candidates who are successful in November arrive in Washington already committed to EFCA when the 111th Congress convenes. (Democratic challengers are currently competing for three open Senate seats and nine held by Republicans with varying degrees of vulnerability; in labor’s best case scenario, the Senate ends up with 60 Democrats and, at long last, the ability to overcome a Republican filibuster.) In its election-year lobbying around the country, the Communications Workers of America (CWA) is deploying rank-and-file members to educate local politicians about CWA’s experience with EFCA-type “card check” procedures. In Little Rock, for example, AT&T wireless customer service reps visited Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln to recount how their supervisors had used threats, intimidation, and harassment to thwart past union activity. When ownership of the Little Rock center changed – and it was covered by an “organizing rights” agreement between AT&T and CWA – workers there were able to secure union recognition quickly through a process that included management neutrality and American Arbitration Association (AAA) verification of their “card majority.”

Among the 20,000 or more AT&T workers who have won bargaining rights in similar fashion since 2004 is a group of 600 located in Dover, New Hampshire. Their CWA organizing committee had a meeting with former N.H. governor Jean Shaheen, who is now committed to becoming an EFCA sponsor if she defeats one of the weakest GOP incumbents this Fall, Senator John Sununu. The Dover workers explained to Shaheen how CWA Local 1298 was certified as their bargaining representative after an AAA card count last October (this was the largest private sector organizing victory in the state in nearly three decades). However, negotiations on a first contract with AT&T were delayed for several months due to the new notice posting and waiting period requirement imposed by the NLRB in its Dana/Metaldyne case decisions. [6] In those rulings, Bush appointees on the Board tried to undermine privately negotiated recognition agreements by giving anti-union workers 45-days, after certification via card check, to petition for a de-certification vote. Thus if 30 percent of the workers in a new unit sign up, they can bring in the NLRB to hold an election – even after a majority of the workforce has just authorized a union to represent them! At AT&T in Dover, an effective in-plant campaign last winter thwarted any minority bid for a decertification vote; but eight months later, workers still have no contract, due to the difficulty of first contract bargaining with even a “union-friendly” company (which, in this is case, is acting as a call center contractor for the U.S. State Department, which is threatening to take the work elsewhere).

Doubtful Impact?

By placing a new obstacle in the path of card check recognition and, potentially, forcing more organizing back into the arena of NLRB elections, Dana has given the unions most involved in “non-Board organizing” an additional incentive to win passage of EFCA. Even if the NLRA is not amended, however, the Dana decision – as well as other anti-worker rulings by the “Bush Board” – could be reversed under a new Democratic administration. But that would require more labor-friendly appointees and several years of case-by-case adjudication and/or agency rule-making. Overall, as The Nation notes, “Democratic labor board majorities have had little positive effect on organizing” in recent decades. “Private-sector union membership dropped steadily and by more than half between 1977 and 2000, while the two parties spent equal time in the White House. The Reagan years were particularly dismal, but labor didn’t exactly thrive under the Carter and Clinton boards either.” [7]

On the other hand, within organized labor, “there is a widespread presumption that enactment of EFCA would cause a reversal in unions’ private sector fortunes” by building on the success of card check and neutrality agreements negotiated by SEIU, UNITE-HERE, CWA, IBT, UAW, UFCW, and other unions. As Cornell University professor Richard Hurd confirmed in New Labor Forum recently, that view is not shared by all academic researchers. [8] According to Hurd, “even a cursory review of the Canadian experience under provincial laws that parallel EFCA indicates that…expectations of union deliverance from organizing purgatory may prove to be overly optimistic.” Hurd cites the work of Canadian labor relations scholar Roy Adams, who points out that “union density and bargaining coverage are falling even in such provinces as Saskatchewan and Quebec that have card check and first-contract arbitration clauses.” Adams predicts that U.S. management – like Canadian firms – will find new ways to resist unionization, even if EFCA is enacted, and that its net impact will be minimal. [9]

Rutgers law professor James Pope is another EFCA skeptic – and a critic of labor’s overly narrow definition of “labor law reform.” Along with Peter Kellman, president of the Portland, Maine AFL-CIO central labor council, and Ed Bruno, organizing director for the National Nurses Organizing Committee (an affiliate of the California Nurses Association), Pope argues that “EFCA is merely the latest in a series of disconnected attempts to ram through the best bill that appears winnable at a particular moment in time.”[10] Earlier attempts they cite include the Carter-era Labor Law Reform bill that failed in 1978 and labor’s unsuccessful 1992-94 push for passage of the Workplace Fairness Act. Never enacted, the latter measure was a union response to the widely-publicized and usually quite devastating hiring of replacement workers during lost strikes in the 1980s.

The Workplace Fairness Act would not even have prevented employers from hiring temporary labor during a walkout – but it would have banned permanent striker replacements. To this day, in an economic strike without favorable return-to-work terms, employers still have no legal obligation to lay off “scabs” when a settlement is reached; strikers can return to their old jobs only as vacancies develop.

According to the authors, EFCA’s failure to close this loophole renders the “right to organize… of little use” because organizing and bargaining are so closely linked. The combination of card check and

compulsory arbitration to win first contracts… might make it easier for unions to sign up dues-paying members in the short run, but it will do little or nothing to strengthen the labor movement in the long run. When the first contract expires, the newly recruited members will discover that they have little or no bargaining power, that their ‘right to strike’ consists of the right to be permanently replaced, and that stronger unions are banned from assisting them with sympathy strikes or secondary boycotts.

Implicit in the critique above is the idea that labor law reform will always fall short if it doesn’t overturn Taft-Hartley Act restrictions on real union solidarity and the Supreme Court’s 70-year old sanctioning of the use of striker replacements. Unfortunately – except in the speeches of Ralph Nader – repeal of Taft-Hartley and a ban on permanent striker replacements is not a big part of political discourse today. Pope, Kellman, and Bruno propose to change that by recasting labor’s campaign as a fight for “the full acceptance of workers rights as an essential component of American freedom.” They reject “EFCA’s slogan of ‘free choice'” as “a short term marketing soundbite” that “kowtows to our society’s dominant ethos of individualism” and fails to “capture the labor movement’s true objectives or its appeal to workers.” In order to “win workers rights, the labor movement needs to act like a genuine rights movement.” Instead, they believe that EFCA inadvertently “plays into the hands of anti-union spin-masters, whose vision of the natural, union-free workplace is pervasive in the media, in academia, and in the public consciousness.”

The authors argue for a longer-term, more radical legal/political strategy, based on “the freedom of association model” and the early 20th century labor idea that federal guarantees of the right to strike and bargain collectively should be rooted in the 13th amendment’s protection against involuntary servitude – rather than the commerce clause, which became the constitutional basis for the Wagner Act. Their review of the history of labor law reform efforts based on “freedom of association” highlights the Norris-LaGuardia Act instead. The authors call it “the most effective pro-worker statute in U.S. history” because it curbed “what were then perceived as the two greatest threats to ‘full freedom of association,’ namely federal court injunctions against peaceful concerted activity and federal court enforcement of yellow-dog contracts” (which prevented workers from joining unions not approved by their employer).

Whatever one may think of the feasibility of their alternative strategy, one point made by Pope, Kellman, and Bruno is indisputable and raises yet another, more practical concern about EFCA – namely how does it get enacted without a lot of outside-the-Beltway agitation? As the authors note, “a genuine rights movement relies primarily on the activity of its rank-and-file members… and not on ordinary lobbying or staff-driven campaigns… From the Erdman Act of 1898 to the public sector bargaining laws of the 1970s, every major workers rights statute has been preceded by widespread collective action demanding and exercising workers rights.”

A Million Member Mobilization?

Key strategists in the campaign for EFCA are not unaware of this history. While “organizing unions” can’t summon up a social movement out of thin air, they can try to build on their collective experience of strikes, lock-outs, and membership mobilization on behalf of organizing-related demands. Some of these recent “bargain to organize” struggles have raised membership consciousness about the importance of winning EFCA-type card check language (plus employer neutrality) in new contracts. [11] Past labor law reform efforts – such as the failed 1977-78 bid – had much less of a grassroots orientation than the current effort, relying instead on consultant-driven Capitol Hill lobbying. The Carter Administration, in turn, backed changes in the NLRA like it was doing a favor for a special interest group – providing a quid pro quo for past election support not much different than Congressional Democrats’ perennial introduction, years ago, of “common situs picketing” bills. (Long viewed as a sop to the building trades, this AFL-CIO-backed legislation never succeeded in loosening restrictions on worker solidarity on construction sites.)

As they did last year, business groups will depict labor law reform as a dangerous “Big Labor” power grab, financed by millions of dollars in union donations to the Democrats. (No matter how much unions have shrunk, in the imagination of www.unionfacts.com and like-minded sources of disinformation, the bogeyman of “Big Labor” still stalks the land, just like it did in the late 1940s when Taft-Hartley was required to tame it!) In HR Magazine earlier this year, former management lawyer Rick Berman, now executive director of the Center for Union Facts in Washington, D.C., warned employers that if, EFCA passes, “private sector union membership could double.” In the same article, well-known union busting consultant Stephen Cabot sounded the alarm about the proposed law’s higher penalties for management misconduct. “Currently, many employers engage in initiatives to counter union campaigns they wouldn’t dare do under EFCA,” Cabot said. “With EFCA, it will be very costly.” HR‘s conclusion: “If EFCA passes, it would be the most significant pro-labor legislation in more than two decades” – employers should rightly fear that it “will open the floodgates for organizing.” [12]

To broaden support for EFCA, unions are depicting it – more accurately – as essential to their institutional survival. Without NLRA reform, organized labor will also be further weakened as a defender of working class living standards and an historic ally of progressive political causes. Defending pension and medical benefits – not to mention protecting Social Security and replacing job-based health insurance with a Medicare-For-All system – becomes increasingly difficult, if not impossible, without greater union density. The current recession provides yet another compelling reason for Congressional action on EFCA – since workers’ rights could be a helpful part of any real “economic stimulus” package (that goes beyond the tax rebates dispensed, in bi-partisan fashion, by the White House and Congress earlier this year). As economist Dean Baker, from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, explains:

While suppression of workers’ right to organize may appear to have little direct relationship to the collapsing housing bubble that is the cause of this recession, on closer examination they are closely linked… If workers are able to form unions and get their share of productivity growth, it can again put the country on the path of wage-driven consumption growth, instead of growth driven by unsustainable borrowing… Restoring a wage-driven growth path will provide workers and businesses with much more stability than the current bubble economy. [13]

Yet policy arguments like Baker’s – so redolent of the Depression-era rationale for passage of the Wagner Act in the first place – won’t carry the day in Washington, D.C. without a lot more “boots on the ground” (and the accompanying sound of marching feet). Enter, the AFL-CIO’s “Million-Member Mobilization” for “bargaining rights worth working for and voting for!” At the initiative of CWA President Larry Cohen and others on the federation’s executive council, the AFL-CIO resolved last spring to get ten percent of all union members signed up on pledge cards demanding that Congress and the White House take action on EFCA. To reach its goal of collecting one million signatures by January, this campaign has both an internal and external component:

Every national union, state federation, central labor council trade department, constituency group, local union and allied organization commits to massive membership mobilization about the assault on collective bargaining, the middle class, and our unions… We must educate, mobilize, and enlist our members in the movement to pass the Employee Free Choice Act.

Every segment of the labor movement also commits to engage and cultivate more allies, religious leaders, civil rights leaders, academics, think tanks, and other opinion leaders to speak out about the importance of restoring the freedom to form unions to build a just society. [14]

As longtime activists know, resolution-passing by labor federations often papers over an underlying gap between official rhetoric and reality. [15] In this case, one reality is that several major unions have tended to be MIA on EFCA because their predominantly public-sector membership won’t benefit much, if at all, from private-sector labor law changes. EFCA is also largely irrelevant to current strategies for regaining “union market share” in construction (although a few building trades unions are committed to it anyway). Ditto for airline industry labor, which is covered by the Railway Labor Act rather than the NLRA. Among the remaining industrial, (non-airline) transportation, utility, service sector, and retail unions with the biggest stake in EFCA’s passage, individual union capacity for (and commitment to) membership mobilization varies widely.

That’s why a core group of AFL-CIO unions stepped forward, initially, to spearhead the campaign. CWA, the United Auto Workers, the United Steelworkers, and the much smaller International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE) formed an election-year alliance based on a professed shared commitment to “unprecedented workplace activity” on behalf of EFCA. All four, with a total membership of two million, had earlier balked at paying a $1 per member special assessment sought by the AFL-CIO to fund its more diffuse 2008 GOTV drive. Instead, Alliance unions have pooled resources to reach and engage 15% of their members in a coordinated field campaign aimed at making EFCA a reality.

As Cohen of CWA argued, “Our own history, as well as that of other labor movements around the world, teaches us that we must act to create change – not sit back and hope for it, or hire others to make it happen for us.” Cohen has encouraged Change to Win affiliates to help inject EFCA into political races, just as Alliance unions have tried to do, through rank-and-file activity that forces candidates to talk about workers rights, in front of union and non-union audiences. (There was little evidence of this, however, in the three McCain-Obama presidential debates, or the vice-presidential one.) Around the country, organizers have tried to put a human face on the hundreds of thousands of EFCA pledge cards they’ve been collecting at the local level. CWA and other unions are photographing rank-and-file endorsers of EFCA so their pictures can be posted on campaign websites and sent to Washington, along with the cards. In this fashion, they hope to convince legislators that labor law reform is a worker priority, not just a project of the union bureaucracy and its professional lobbyists.

Labor’s combined efforts may still not be enough to pressure the Democrats to use any mandate they get in November. In January, workers’ rights could face stiff competition from other priorities related to health care or the nation’s economy, which has dominated the Congressional agenda lately. If Obama makes it to the White House, he may be tempted to take a Jimmy Carter-style dive or start bobbing and weaving like Bill Clinton to avoid another knock-down, drag-out fight with corporate America early in his administration. Only grassroots pressure, now and then, can insure that this bout even occurs – plus ends favorably for labor.

The article above is also being published in ‘Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas’, Journal of the Labor and Working Class History Association (see http://www.lawcha.org)

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Endnotes

1. Steve Early, ‘Union Busting and the Law’, The United Mine Workers Journal, December, 1975, 10-17.

2. Throughout 2008, there have been media predictions that the Democrats would make big gains on Capitol Hill in November. See, for example, David Herszenhorn, ‘Senate Democrats Hope for a Majority Not Seen in 30 Years: 60 Seats’, The New York Times, March 7, 2008, A14; and Charles Babington, ‘As GOP Lawmakers Opt Not to Run, Dems See Opportunity in Congress’, The San Francisco Chronicle, March 21, 2008, A4.

3. For a scathing but accurate critique of labor’s failure to support Edwards, who “spent the last four years working with unions, walking their picket lines, and making their cause his,” see Ian Welsh, ‘The Glorious Future that American Unions Walked Away From’, The Huffington Post, January 18, 2008;
http://www.Huffingtonpost.com
Subsequent revelations about Edwards’ personal life, if they had surfaced when he was the nominee, might have made his political future less glorious.

4. Brian DeBose, ‘Obama Banks on Union’s Support’, The Washington Times, March 3, 2008, 4.

5. Chris Townsend, ‘The Deck’s Stacked against Labor’, The UE News, February, 2008, 15.

6. Kim Moody, ‘Card Check Takes a Hit’, Labor Notes, December, 2007, 4-5.

7. Max Fraser, ‘Beyond the Labor Board’, The Nation, Jan. 21, 2008, 6-8; for a critique of the performance of the NLRB during the Clinton years, see Steve Early, ‘How Stands the Union?’, The Nation, January 22, 2001, 25-27.

8. Richard Hurd, ‘Neutrality Agreements: Innovative, Controversial, and Labor’s Hope for the Future’, New Labor Forum, Spring, 2008, 35-44.

9. See Roy Adams, ‘The Employee Free Choice Act: A Reality Check’, Labor and Employment Relations Association, Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting, 2006.

10. See James Pope, Peter Kellman, and Ed Bruno, ‘The Employee Free Choice Act and a Long-Term Strategy for Winning Workers’ Rights’, Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society, Vol. 11, March, 2008, 125-144.

11. See for example the 2005-6 ‘Hotel Workers Rising’ campaign which, according to UNITE-HERE president Bruce Raynor, produced neutrality agreements that have added 6,000 new members to the union (cited in Hurd, above). For an account of the strike by 75,000 CWA and IBEW members against Verizon in 2000 which occurred, in part, due to a long-running (and still unresolved) organizing rights dispute with Verizon Wireless, see Steve Early, ‘Verizon Strike Highlights New Union Role’, The Boston Globe, September 3, 2000, E7.

12. Robert J. Grossman, ‘Reorganized Labor’, HR Magazine, January, 2008.

13. See Dean Baker, ‘The Recession and the Freedom to Organize’, posted February 6, 2008 by AFL-CIO.
http://www.aflcio.org/mediacenter/speakout/dean_baker.cfm

14. For full text of AFL-CIO Executive Council’s March 10, 2008 statement, see:
http://www.aflcio.org/aboutus/thisistheaflcio/ecouncil/ec030420081.cfm

15. For a good discussion of this problem, see Chris Kutalik, ‘Labor’s Political Game Falls Short without Pressure from below’, Labor Notes, February, 2008, 1-2.

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Steve Early has been active in labor since 1972 as a lawyer, journalist, organizer, and union representative. He worked for the Communications Workers of America for 27 years and was involved in CWA organizing at AT&T, Verizon, Lucent, and many other companies. He is the author of a forthcoming book for Monthly Review Press (Spring, 2009) called Embedded With American Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War At Home. He can be reached at Lsupport@aol.com .

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