In this extraordinary tale of union democracy, Dana L. Cloud
engages union reformers at Boeing in Wichita and Seattle to reveal
how ordinary workers attempted to take command of their futures by
chipping away at the cozy partnership between union leadership and
corporate management. Taking readers into the central dilemma of
having to fight an institution while simultaneously using it as a
bastion of basic self-defense, We Are the Union offers a
sophisticated exploration of the structural opportunities and
balance of forces at play in modern unions told through a highly
relevant case study. Focusing on the 1995 strike at Boeing, Cloud
renders a multi-layered account of the battles between company and
the union and within the union led by Unionists for Democratic
Change and two other dissident groups. She gives voice to the
company's claims of the hardships of competitiveness and the
entrenched union leaders' calls for concessions in the name of job
security, alongside the democratic union reformers' fight for a
rank-and-file upsurge against both the company and the union
leaders. We Are the Union is grounded in on-site research and
interviews and focuses on the efforts by Unionists for Democratic
Change to reform unions from within. Incorporating theory and
methods from the fields of organizational communication as well as
labor studies, Cloud methodically uncovers and analyzes the goals,
strategies, and dilemmas of the dissidents who, while wanting to
uphold the ideas and ideals of the union, took up the gauntlet to
make it more responsive to workers and less conciliatory toward
management, especially in times of economic stress or crisis. Cloud
calls for a revival of militant unionism as a response to union
leaders' embracing of management and training programs that put
workers in the same camp as management, arguing that reform groups
should look to the emergence of powerful industrial unions in the
United States for guidance on revolutionizing existing institutions
and building new ones that truly accommodate workers' needs.
Drawing from communication studies, labor history, and oral history
and including a chapter co-written with Boeing worker Keith Thomas,
We Are the Union contextualizes what happened at Boeing as an
exemplar of agency that speaks both to the past and the future.
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