L.A. Story — Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement – By Ruth Milkman
| Date | 01 December 2007 |
| Author | Bruce Nissen |
| Published date | 01 December 2007 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.2007.00658.x |
L.A. Story — Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement by Ruth
Milkman. Russell Sage Foundation, New York, xiii +244 pp., ISBN
0871546353, US$24.95.
This is an aptly named book. In it, author Ruth Milkman documents a minor
resurgence of the labour movement in the City of Los Angeles (LA) and shows the
centrality of immigrant workers to that resurgence. Los Angeles is considered the
most successful example of ‘social movement’ labour revitalization in the United
States today. This account of how that happened is a welcome addition to research on
labour’s fate in twenty-first-century America.
The book skillfully weaves together a number of strands that are necessary if we are
to understand why this city surprisingly became a beacon of hope for unions in the
United States. As it demonstrates, Los Angeles had long been considered a town with
a weak labour movement, the bastion of the ‘open shop’. How did the Los Angeles
labour movement turn itself around in the past two decades?
Milkman argues that the conjuncture of three factors created the opportunity for
a labour turnaround. First, the existing labour movement in the city was dominated
by ‘old line’ American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions organized around occu-
pation rather than Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions organized on
an industrial basis. This made the movement more flexible and resilient in times of
downturn and an unfavourable political climate. Much as AFL craft unions were
the only survivors of the anti-union offensive in the early part of the twentieth
century, so were craft or occupational unions more able to survive in the 1980s and
1990s when globalization, deregulation, rightward political trends and employer
hostility devastated major industrial CIO unions such as the autoworkers or the
steelworkers.
Second, and paradoxically, the very viciousness of employer restructuring and
opposition to unions in Los Angeles and southern California actually aided union
resurgence. Employers went on the offensive sooner and harder in LA, affording the
local labour movement none of the complacency so evident in other cities that were
bigger union strongholds. Milkman argues that a ‘crisis’ of unmistakable proportions
is a necessary ingredient to a labour fightback and turnaround.
And third, the massive influx of immigrants, primarily from Mexico and Central
America (but also including many Asians) into LA, provided a workforce predisposed
towards unionism. This book thoroughly and conclusively destroys the notion, pre-
viously held in much of the US labour movement, that immigrants were unorganiz-
able. In fact, evidence supports the reverse: immigrants tend to be more inclined
towards unions than the native born. Immigrants play the central (and heroic) role in
this book: they are the key actors making a positive turnaround for organized labour
at least thinkable.
Beyond these general factors underlying LA labour’s resurgence, the book
addresses a number of other important topics. One is the debate over ‘top-down’
versus ‘bottom-up’ ways of organizing workers into unions. Top-down organizing
methods concentrate on pressuring employers to accept a union, while bottom-up
methods rely on rank-and-file organization and mobilization. Some have criticized
the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), by far the most successful orga-
nizing union in the United States (and Los Angeles), for relying too much on top-
down methods and undemocratic ways of operating internally. Milkman argues that
both top-down and bottom-up methods are necessary in the current environment in
the United States and asserts that the SEIU uses both very skillfully.
Book Reviews 871
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2007.
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