Labor Now: Union Reform

The second installment of Labor Now, a three-part monthly winter panel series, where moderator Amber A’Lee Frost brings together trade unionists, labor journalists and labor historians to talk about worker power.

This installment is centered on union reform. Filmed at Verso Books in Brooklyn, January 18, 2017.

The operations and internal structures of many of the larger, modern unions would be unrecognizable to the radical trade unionists responsible for the major progressive advances in this country. Far from their beginnings as democratic organizations of the working class, many unions have undergone a process of NGO-ification, where leadership has been subsumed by unaccountable bureaucracy and/or the Democratic Party, and the rank and file are often reduced to a funding source with little to no power. Recently though, there has been some marked success in internal reforms. So how do workers take back the unions?

SPEAKERS:
Pamela Galpern: CWA Local 1101
Beth Breslaw: Teamsters for a Democratic Union
Alexandra Bradbury: Editor and Co-Director of Labor Notes

Видео Labor Now: Union Reform канала Verso Books