Amy Dean Points Labor Toward New, New Deal

By Ken Volante, MTI Staff

Amy Dean and David Reynolds’ A New New Deal:  How Regional Activism Will Reshape the American Labor Movement ($29.95), recently released by Cornell University Press, is a timely meditation on the strategies necessary to build regional progressive power and reshape the political direction of the United States.

The “regional power” analysis shows the promise in labor organizing and political activism in close coalition with other progressive organizations such as faith-based groups, community advocacy groups, environmentalists, living wage campaigns and local referenda committees.

The book does not offer a theoretical fix-all nor promise a specific nuts-and-bolts how-to of regional power building. Rather, the authors take great pains to describe the elements of what works in regional labor power building.

Author Amy Dean’s first hand experience in the field, particularly, her work in the Silicon Valley’s South Bay Labor Council, lend credence to the applicability of the blueprint. The authors also detail regional power building movements that (for the time being) failed. Finally, they issue a humble call to arms based on the massive gains possible in a regional strategy. That carrot should be enticing enough for the famished American labor movement.

A New Hope

Labor must think and act regionally. As a result of fractured local governance and issues, such as transportation, that span beyond one specific locale, labor must think regionally and in concert with regional players in order to effect lasting change. Such work is extremely difficult.

American Labor is rightly criticized for being insular, provincial and slow-as-auntie’s molasses on a cold winter day. In all fairness, Labor has also been beat up pretty bad since “Business Organized as a Class” (to quote labor writer Kim Moody) in the 1970s. That said, while Labor has tremendous ability and resources to affect political change, it has largely done so in near term, cyclical outbursts of effort.

While these may result in “wins” (a la Labor 2008) this behavior does not engender the trust of potential coalition partners who need labor’s help, say, two months after the election. By building a coalition around a framework of progressive issues the labor movement can partner with a few to dozens of local advocacy organizations to affect regional change. If business organized as a class, why is it any less possible for Labor to work with those it can create close communion with?

Coalitions that Work

Dean and Reynolds identify three characteristics of regional power building:  developing a regional policy agenda, creating a deep and lasting regional coalition and moving from access to government.

A regional policy agenda is necessary to address workers’ needs that are larger than the “meat and potatoes” work that unions tend to do well. These critical issues may include affordable housing, a living wage, public transportation issues, and affordable health insurance. The authors identify “The work done by the Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS) to support the Milwaukee and Madison efforts [to] demonstrate how systematic research can pave the way for concrete strategies (115).” This research supported the Wisconsin Regional Training Partnership (WTRP) which brought together unions, community organizations and one-hundred firms that employed 65,000 workers. Employers who joined followed a basic code of conduct for worker training, allowed greater worker involvement in the firm, and sought to solve problems collectively (114).

Deep coalitions have an ultimate goal “to move beyond transactional relationships (‘I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine’) to relationships based on intertwined interests and strongly shared values” (131). In this fashion coalition partners make shared values a deep and lasting mutually shared agenda in order to forge the way to regional power.

Working in coalition helps labor unions to move from access to governance. “Another weakness in traditional labor and progressive politics is the lack of candidate accountability. Having worked to elect good candidates, organized labor and its allies often ask very little in return” (180). Unions have become increasingly effective, through initiatives such as Labor 2004 and Labor 2008, in working on national elections by mobilizing members around worker issues (and the candidates who support them). While these efforts have proven to be an effective model, labor’s fate remains tenuous in such scenarios as greater power is necessary to hold public officials accountable.

By combining these three fundamental characteristics of regional coalition building Labor can ultimately create the campaign issues, recruit candidates who support them, educate candidates on the shared issue agenda and hold officials accountable to remain dedicated to the issues important to the workers who got them elected.

Dean and Reynolds then move on to identify conditions that foster (and/or hinder) regional power building work:  the emergence of labor movement institutional leaders, foundation fiscal support, established models and the availability of peer-to-peer support, and regional economic conditions. Their succinct analysis of case studies in Denver, Seattle, Atlanta, New Haven, Boston, Milwaukee and Cleveland help the reader to understand the difficulties and potential for labor’s work in regional power building.

The analysis is at times sober but continues to build towards correcting the errors of past work by the ultimate juxtaposition of Dean’s work with the South Bay Labor Council (detailed at the beginning of the book) with other efforts around the country. The reader is allowed to make her own estimation of this regional framework’s potential. Ultimately the authors are very persuasive in their arguments. Who better than Labor, the ideal of collective and solidarity forged in a land of free agency and individualism, to show the way for a new future?

The book is, simply, engaging and hopeful. The reader is left, though, wondering about the details on how provincialism, pervasive racism, organizational limitations and the clash of leader personalities can be worked through. Those efforts are worthy of a supplemental study. Detailed guidance on handling these issues is necessary through a manual or by a hands-on workshop. The book successfully argues for a shared vision of the future, for labor – and for its obvious, as well as its yet to be realized, allies. Indeed, the book seems to tacitly argue for something beyond a “New, New Deal.”

If Labor is able to realize the power of its own capacity, and work through internal and external differences, then it would be able to cut the deal that is beyond the deal. Labor and its allies can forge, not beg, for its coherent vision for a collective future in spite of Corporate America and its continued contributions to modernity’s dissolution.