Description
Book SynopsisA timely account of workers taking back their union
Trade Review"Provides readers with the authentic voices of workers struggling to be heard."--
Industrial and Labor Relations Review"[A] detailed and well-researched study. . . . Makes a case for a more aggressive, more democratic labor movement that could reverse declining union membership density. Recommended."--
Choice"Cloud poignantly portrays the exhausting costs of activism—personal, financial, and political."--Journal of American History
"Dana Cloud explores how rank-and-file workers used their union both to advance their interests and to challenge the company. The author and her narrators together shape a history of a strong intra-union protest movement and expose the narrators' disagreements with one another about strategy along the way."--
Oral History Review"The book connects the subterranean intellectual tradition of militant worker history. . . . with struggles unfolding in the current political conjuncture. . . . An exceptional contribution to labor movement and rhetorical scholarship and the promise that the insights of this scholarship can impact the world beyond the walls of the academy."--
Rhetoric Society Quarterly"Highly recommended."--
Labour/Le Travail"
We Are the Union offers an excellent cautionary tale to union educators, activists, and leaders for finding ways to reinvigorate the American labor movement in the face of union bureaucracy and hostile employers and their political supporters."--
Labor Studies Journal"Dana Cloud's
We are the Union demonstrates the importance of local actors in union change and renewal. . . . [and] how workers are aware of the various types of discrimination and their agency in navigating the spaces of discrimination. Various audiences. . . . could benefit from this text including labor scholars and activists, communications scholars and qualitative researchers."--
Work, Employment and Society "Dana L. Cloud raises vital, critical questions: Why have union reformers had so little success in the last thirty-five years? To what extent have their own analyses, actions, and choices contributed to the shortfalls or outright failures of their efforts? Given the deepening crisis of the U.S. labor movement, it is well past time to ask these questions. This will be a widely read and passionately contested contribution to contemporary labor history."--Peter Rachleff, author of
Hard Pressed in the Heartland: The Hormel Strike and the Future of the Labor Movement "
We Are
the Union is an important record and analysis of rank-and-file voices during a key period in the union democracy movement at Boeing. The depth of the conversations Dana L. Cloud documents, along with her engagement with workers' stories, disputes media propaganda that workers are selfish and think only of themselves rather than the greater common good."--Deepa Kumar, author of
Outside the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization, and the UPS Strike
