Meet #SteveEarly & ❝Save Our Unions❞…video, book review +

…not that I intended to make this a movie marathon weekend but with this Saturday post and a Barbara Wolf selection scheduled for tomorrow's Sunday Matinee / COCAL XI lead in post, that's what the weekend is starting to look like. Some post decisions are considered, even planned and researched; others appear on the spur of the moment, unannounced or prompted by a chance exchange. This is one of the latter.

I've been reading and saving Steve Early articles on unions and organizing. Just recently Keith Hoeller brought up the most recent book. He met and spoke with Early at the book tour's Seattle. That gave me the idea of asking Keith to write a review of Save Our Unions from the perspective of organizing adjunct and academic labor. So I did. Then came the idea of this post while I''m waiting to hear from him (and  OK to nudge him on just a bit too). To accompany the video below, here are links to a review, an interview (podcast) and an author bio, short version:

David Blacker: The Falling Rate of Learning & the Neoliberal Endgame

…makes a powerful case that in the present phase of capitalism, our rulers are abandoning the previous era’s principle of universal education. No shit.

Blacker’s specific focus is on education in the Western states but his contextualisation also includes hard-hitting analyses of political economy, environmental degradation and socialist strategy. The book is written in an erudite but witty style that leaves the reader with the clear and distinct impression that the next few decades will decide the fate of the human race. Blacker ominously warns us that the current global hegemony of the capitalist order presents most of our species with a grim choice: ‘we are subject to the harsh survivalist disjunction - we will have to kill it before it kills us’ (p.19).

Read a review of the The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame in Counterfire and listen to an interview (one of many) with David J. Blacker,

Labor Organizing as a Civil Right

 …an idea and article worth revisiting: a 2012 Dissent Magazine article by Century Foundation senior fellow Richard D. Kahlenberg and labor/employment discrimination attorney Moshe Z. Marvit, also authors of Why Labor Organizing Should Be a Civil Right: Rebuilding a Middle-Class Democracy by Enhancing Worker Voice. 

The "union organizing as a civil right" concept, implicit in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, appeared in 2008, reported by David Sirota in the Nation and elsewhere as "labor attorney Tom Geoghegan's 6 little words". Although widely cited at the time and still remembered by many, nobody took the idea and ran with it. Or so I thought until discovering the Dissent link in "The problem with Thomas Piketty: Capital destroys right-wing lies, but there’s one solution it forgets"  (Salon) by Thomas Franks, author of What's The Matter With Kansas and Baffler founding editor. That solution would be unions and reforming labor laws: