Marcus Widenor

Helping New Organizers Survive and Thrive in the Field: The Essential Role of Training and Mentoring

The labor movements attempt to reinvigorate its organizing pro gram has resulted in the recruitment of hundreds of new organiz ers. Despite this renewed dedication of resources to organizing, the turnover rate of entry level organizers remains high. This paper examines the organizing training and retention efforts of local unions affiliated with five internationals. Through interviews with organizing directors, lead organizers and new field organizers, we explore the training needs and expectations of new organizers. We identify how their initial training in the field and ongoing support relate to their success and retention. We recommend a much higher level of support of new organizers, including ongoing educational opportunities and the establishment of personalized mentoring relationships with experienced staff.

Book Reviews : Public Workers: Government Employee Unions, the Law, and the State, 1900- 1962. By Joseph E. Slater. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. 260 pp.

ment. However, their history is largely ignored by both the &dquo;old&dquo; institutional historians, and the &dquo;new labor historians,&dquo; whose work on the cultural, racial and gender dynamics of workers’ movements has dominated scholarship for the last thirty years. With the publication of Joseph Slater’s volume we finally have a benchmark upon which to build a comprehensive literature on the history of public employee unionism. Slater’s theoretical framework places heavy emphasis on how the labor law regimes of American state, county and local government re, tarded union development between 1900 and the early 1960s. Central to his thesis is the unrelenting hostility of government to the notion that unionism is compatible with the employment relationship between public workers and the state. Or, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it in a landmark Massachusetts case: &dquo;The petitioner may have a constitutional right to talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman.&dquo; &dquo;

39.95 hardcover

topical areas: the role of politics and the state in working-class history, the interrelationship between class and culture, and the historical experience of worker activism and institution building. The section on politics and the state includes a study of the relationship between abolitionism and labor radicalism in Massachusetts by co-editor Bruce Laurie, as well as papers on the internal politics of the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations during the Progressive era, the role of employer and worker organizations in electoral politics, and the New York anti-rent wars of the 1840s. The essays represent an insightful overview of the different ways American workers have engaged in the

Book Reviews : Labor Histories: Class, Politics, and the Working-Class Experience. Edited by Eric Arnesen, Julie Greene, and Bruce Laurie. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998. 382 pp.,

1904, black and white miners built a strong union that stabilized conditions in the Birmingham district. However, the miners and their union left segregation firmly entrenched in schools and union locals, unable to break totally free of the racial climate in which they existed. Letwin suggests that this strange amalgam of interracial union solidarity in a Jim Crow society occurred because of the absence of women in the workplace. Removing the potential for interracial sexuality diminished much of the tension which proved such a barrier to black-white cooperation in other environments. Finally, the UMW reemerged for a third time during World War I. With the aid of federal government intervention, black and white miners again overcame red-baiting and race-baiting, a testament to their ongoing conviction to build interracial unionism. Although the operators experimented with corporate welfare and enlisted support from the black middle class, miners rushed to the union when not facing open resistance. But when government assistance disappeared, the operators resorted to playing the race card and to overt repression to oust the UMW from the Birmingham district. Letwin’s excellent book should remind us that race and class iden-