David Moberg - Piven: Labor Revival Needs Push From Outside and Below
March 14, 2012 Frances Fox Piven, the City University of New York sociologist best known for her work on poor people's movements (which led to unwanted attention as the bete noire of right-wing fulminator Glenn Beck), turned her attention last week to an oft-repeated question: "Can American labor recover?" Her short answer might be: Maybe (I hope so), but not on its own, and not without a push from outside.
For more than a century, Piven told an audience primarily of University of Chicago graduate students, most visions of the left revolved in some way around the unions and their power to organize the working class at work and in politics, thereby disciplining capitalists and supporting social democratic gains or the flimsy U.S. "safety net." At its high point after World War II until the 1970s, the unions created a "tacit social compact" with broadly shared benefits.
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