thenation--2020-05-05--How Should Unions Organize?

How Should Unions Organize?

In 2018 , I was back home in the Seattle area , trying to understand the new texture of the place .
There had always been pockets of wealth concentrated around high-tech companies like Boeing and Microsoft .
But now , both in atmosphere and dollars , Greater Seattle had begun to feel like an Amazon company town .
I wanted to know how non-engineers were getting by and whether longtime residents , low-wage workers , and newly transplanted coders could find common ground.1 A Collective Bargain : Unions , Organizing , and the Fight for Democracy I began to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Organizing Collective , a group convened by the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America .
The facilitators were current and former union organizers , but most of the people who attended knew little of the labor movement .
They were baristas and retail clerks , food service workers and engineers .
They went to commiserate and to brainstorm solutions to unequal pay , abusive managers , and schedules that spun their homelives into chaos .
The tech workers also raised larger-scale grievances such as unethical outsourcing and violations of privacy.2 At @ @ @ @ @ @ @ named Ira Pollock gave a presentation .
He was a recent transplant from New York , where he ’ d taught ballroom dance lessons and gotten involved in socialist politics .
Now he was working at a UPS sorting facility in South Seattle , moving containers of boxes and driving a forklift .
The plant had long been unionized under the Teamsters , but as he told the group and then me in a separate interview , “ There was no shop steward .
My coworkers were all part-time , and no calls @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mostly didn ’ t even know the local.
” 3 Pollock began organizing his coworkers , not for a new union but to give meaning to the one they had .
He befriended the people on his shift and encouraged them to come up with a list of shared demands : relief from the smoke when fires raged across western Washington and more staffing to cover spikes in cargo .
He and his colleagues started to act together in ways big and small—signing petitions , pacing themselves on the job , and taking @ @ @ @ @ @ @ themselves be overworked .
“ After that , management started staffing us , ” Pollock told me.4 Their manual was No Shortcuts , a 2016 book by the union strategist Jane McAlevey .
In it she argued that gradual “ whole worker organizing ” and strikes , as opposed to quick , telegenic “ mobilizations , ” can transform not only individual plants and offices but the country as a whole .
Pollock explained to the group in Seattle how he implemented this approach , creating maps of his workplace and community , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ guiding his coworkers through increasingly demanding “ structure tests ” that built their confidence and collective power .
The room seemed as awed by Pollock as he was by McAlevey.5 In recent years , McAlevey , now a senior policy fellow at the UC Berkeley Labor Center ( and the strikes correspondent for The Nation ) , has drawn an enthusiastic following among activists , especially those in the DSA .
She wrote her first book , a 2012 memoir and love letter to organizing titled Raising Expectations ( and Raising Hell ) @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and the Service Employees International Union and , in a testament to her drive , while being treated for cancer .
Then came No Shortcuts , an outgrowth of her dissertation in sociology at the City University of New York , where she studied with Frances Fox Piven .
When the book went to press , McAlevey had no reason to believe that we would witness a resurgence in organizing and strikes .
Yet in 2018 and 2019 , hundreds of thousands of workers joined unions or walked off the job , provoked @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of union-hobbling court decisions , and Donald Trump ’ s election .
No Shortcuts became an organizing bible for many , rivaling such classic guides as Labor Law for the Rank & Filer and A Troublemaker ’ s Handbook.6 McAlevey ’ s latest book , A Collective Bargain , arrives in a new moment of danger and rebellion .
The author ’ s signature arguments are all here , but in the form of a primer on labor and democracy and framed for a general audience .
She wrote the book in a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ says in the acknowledgments ) , and the loosely structured content reflects this haste : a mix of organizing shop talk , myth busters , interviews , case studies , and commentary on everything from Silicon Valley and Chinese manufacturing to employment case law and gun violence .
But that ’ s mostly beside the point .
McAlevey ’ s influence is such that the book , like her first two , is certain to be passed from hand to hand—and what more could an author ask for ?
7 McAlevey started out @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Earth Island Institute in California and then at the Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee .
She advocated for Central Americans harmed by the US military and worked in communities of color facing disproportionate pollution .
But after nearly a decade , she grew tired of the environmental movement ’ s frequent default to publicizing issues instead of organizing people .
After a stint in philanthropy , she was recruited by the AFL-CIO and trained at SEIU 1199 Northeast , a large health care union known for its communist roots and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ absorbed two basic principles of organizing : first , to see workers as human beings , embedded in families and neighborhoods , and second , to use these personal and cultural ties to build clout in strategic industries.8 The model of whole worker organizing was in fact the preferred strategy of the Congress of Industrial Organizations from its founding in 1935 to the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 .
The CIO opposed the American Federation of Labor ’ s practice of sorting workers into separate craft-based guilds ( for carpenters , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , which sliced up the labor movement and excluded those with less bargaining power .
Thus while the AFL spent its resources protecting highly skilled workers and trying to influence the emerging labor-law regime , CIO activists coordinated large-scale strikes and organized hundreds of thousands of manufacturing , mining , steel , and needle trade workers , including immigrants , African Americans , and women .
These remarkable gains were slowed , however , during World War II , then quashed by the Taft-Hartley Act.9 For McAlevey , the 12 golden years of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mystical power , and she has tried to replicate whole worker organizing wherever she goes .
In Connecticut she led the AFL-CIO ’ s Stamford Organizing Project , a citywide multiunion campaign that aimed not only to unionize nursing-home workers and janitors but also to protect affordable housing .
In Las Vegas and Reno , she helped revive a moribund SEIU health care local and recruited thousands of new , strike-ready members from multiple hospitals .
It ’ s clear from Raising Expectations that McAlevey and her staff organized down to the bone—enough @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of friends , hobbies , clergy , and family members.10 If this is real organizing , then what isn ’ t ?
In No Shortcuts , McAlevey distinguished whole worker organizing from two other modes of union activism—advocacy ( lawsuits , legislation ) and mobilization ( public relations campaigns , protesters wielding picket signs ) —and applied this three-part framework to a range of case studies , including the Chicago Teachers Union and its historic strike in 2012 , a pork-factory union in rural North Carolina , and the nonunion immigrant worker center @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we call organizing and imbue with street cred or back-patting self-acclaim , McAlevey argued , often constitutes little more than political performance .
To win , she wrote , unions need to spend less time and money on advertising and litigation and much , much more on targeted workplace campaigns.11 The Promise of a Universal Basic Income—and Its Limitations The Smithfield Foods saga proved her point especially well .
For more than a decade , the United Food and Commercial Workers had tried to unionize the Tar Heel , North Carolina , pork @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Labor Relations Act .
But at each juncture , Smithfield flouted the law , going so far as to assault workers and deploy “ their own police force dressed in riot gear ” to suppress voting in a union election .
The UFCW filed complaint after complaint , but the National Labor Relations Board failed to enforce the NLRA , and the case languished in the federal courts .
This would have been the end , if not for a shift at union headquarters .
In 2006 new leaders at the UFCW decided @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at Smithfield , and to do it by radically changing their strategy.
” They recruited a shop floor organizing committee , charted “ social networks among the workers , ” designed a series of “ escalating ‘ in-plant ’ direct actions , ” including a May Day strike , and with the help of outside activists like the Rev .
Dr. William J. Barber II , built local , state , and national consumer campaigns against the company—a potent mix of organizing and mobilization .
Finally , in 2008 , 5,000 Smithfield employees @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Heel union did more than represent its members , McAlevey argued in No Shortcuts ; it became a base of political support for health care access , immigrant rights , and fair wages “ in a key national electoral swing state that still has the lowest unionization level in the United States.
” Workplace democracy , in other words , could produce a larger democracy for all.13 The tie between a sturdy union and a sturdy republic goes from being a secondary theme in No Shortcuts to the central thesis of A Collective @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ to all the brilliant people who went on strike in 2018 and 2019…raising expectations that life should and can be better.
” In the course of seven chapters—with titles like “ Who Killed the Unions ?
, ” “ Everything You Thought You Knew About Unions Is ( Mostly ) Wrong , ” and “ Are Unions Still Relevant ?
” —she explains why CIO-style organizing is now essential to empower ordinary people and “ change the direction of this country.
” 14 “ The experience of a well-executed union campaign , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ understand , on their own , that their employer ’ s effect on their lives goes beyond assigning them to an overtime shift and preventing them from getting time with their family.
” Whole worker organizing reveals “ that their employer is part of a bigger system that is contributing to the failure of their kids ’ schools , the rollback of anti-pollution and anti-gentrification laws , [ and ] the gross inequities of the tax system , ” which is , in part , why the right has tried so hard to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ McAlevey believes that the basic principles of workplace organizing can be applied to electoral politics , housing , and environmental justice.15 As with McAlevey ’ s first two books , A Collective Bargain is strongest in its dissections of specific labor campaigns .
In a chapter on hospital workers and corporate influence in Philadelphia titled “ How Do Workers Get a Union ?
, ” she vividly evokes an effort in which she played a direct role .
The Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals ( PASNAP ) hired McAlevey as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at the Einstein Medical Center win union recognition and to negotiate the first citywide contract in several other facilities .
Her method at Einstein was simple but slow and granular : to get a supermajority of workers to actively support the union.16 To build this support , McAlevey and her staff mapped out the hospital and identified organic leaders in each department—those who enjoyed the respect of management and held sway with their peers .
The Einstein workers had won an NLRB election some weeks earlier , but the vote was close enough @ @ @ @ @ @ @ filing baseless legal objections and using “ an A-level union avoidance firm ” to turn employees against PASNAP .
Among those turned was a charismatic , widely respected nurse—and indeed , when she tilted “ no , ” most of her department followed suit.17 McAlevey and her team knew that without this nurse , the union would have little hope of negotiating a strong collective bargaining agreement .
They approached her carefully , giving her a copy of the draft contract and appealing to her and her colleagues ’ pride— “ the same @ @ @ @ @ @ @ union.
” They then persuaded the nurse to meet and walked her “ through how negotiations worked in a good union such as PASNAP and how , in a democratic union , all workers were invited and encouraged to attend their own negotiations.
” Less than 24 hours later , the nurse returned with 34 signed union cards .
An organizer I know summed up McAlevey ’ s approach as follows : “ You have to work the plan .
If you work the plan , you will win.
” 18 Few unions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the United Teachers of Los Angeles , which represents 34,000 employees in the LA Unified School District .
The UTLA went on strike in January 2019 and won an unusually ambitious , wide-ranging contract that included caps on classroom size , increased staffing by full-time librarians and counselors , pay raises , legal assistance for undocumented students and their families , green spaces , and limits on charter schools—a major political force in California .
In the chapter “ How to Rebuild a Union , ” McAlevey explains how the UTLA got to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to 2012 , when one of her mentors , the Los Angeles organizer Anthony Thigpenn , partnered with rank-and-file teacher activists to pass a statewide “ millionaire ’ s tax ” that restored billions of dollars to the public sector .
The teachers involved went on to win control of the UTLA in 2014 , electing a “ Union Power slate ” that , in the words of Alex Caputo-Pearl , now the UTLA ’ s president , campaigned explicitly on the need for an “ organizing union.
” 19 Through interviews with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a newly emboldened UTLA led its members through a series of structure tests , escalating actions “ done by hand , face-to-face , across nine hundred schools ” over four years .
In the process of getting workers to attend a rally , sign new membership cards , or agree to pay more dues to fund organizing , the UTLA trained all educators to speak up .
Teachers defined their priorities beyond pay and benefits , to target school privatization and the Trump administration ’ s abuse of migrants .
Community concerns became @ @ @ @ @ @ @ backing they needed to win in 2019.20 A Witness to the Rise of Big Data Writing about the UTLA , McAlevey makes the work of checklists and “ one on ones ” feel high stakes and urgent .
And she adds a structural analysis , arguing that education and health care are crucial strategic sectors , priority “ growth industries ” that are not easily offshored .
Because these workers “ are hard to replace [ and ] have a kind of moral authority in mission-driven work , ” she says , they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ line on corporate greed.
” 21 The downside of a book intended to inspire is that it omits the campaigns that failed , those in which whole worker organizing didn ’ t succeed .
Surely there are times when , no matter how well union organizers chart a community or identify organic leaders or treat workers as networked organisms , they lose anyway .
Reading A Collective Bargain , I wondered what we might learn from such campaigns and whether some contexts , such as construction day labor and informal domestic work , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ One way of considering these questions is through a comparison of McAlevey ’ s whole worker approach with that of her old boss Andy Stern , who was the president of the SEIU .
In the late 1990s he and a group of SEIU leaders developed a plan to unionize workers in fast-growing service sectors—and to do so quickly and in large numbers without deep organizing .
They began with home care workers , the isolated , mostly female aides who serve housebound , low-income elders and people with disabilities covered by Medicaid @ @ @ @ @ @ @ aides and personal care workers were classified as independent contractors , despite being paid and supervised by state agencies .
As a result , they had no right to the overtime pay , workers ’ compensation , or collective bargaining that other public sector employees enjoyed .
Stern ’ s idea was not to organize these care workers through a conventional campaign but instead to pass legislation , state by state , that would deem them public employees for purposes of negotiating a union contract.23 In numerical terms , the strategy was brilliant @ @ @ @ @ @ @ into law , hundreds of thousands of home care workers gained rights , and the SEIU joined with private home care contractors to force higher Medicaid reimbursement rates from state agencies .
Workers saw material improvements , typically in the form of insurance benefits , paid time off , and a bump in their wages to just above the legal minimum .
Yet most home health aides developed no meaningful relationship with the union , let alone one another .
The SEIU neglected to match its visionary recruitment plan with the daunting but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Stern and his protégés have long represented a neoliberal turn in union strategy , from real rank-and-file organizing to technocratic mobilization .
And she seems to have foreseen the vulnerability of their method : Home care unions eventually became the target of the right-to-work lobby and a business-friendly Supreme Court .
In the 2014 case Harris v. Quinn , the court found that aides compensated by Medicaid were only “ partial ” public employees and therefore could not be required to pay into the cost of union representation .
The ruling threatened @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , by extension , the earnings and working conditions of aides and the welfare of patients .
In 2018 the court expanded the holding in Harris to apply to all public sector unions.25 Many people in the labor movement share McAlevey ’ s criticisms of Stern , who now shills for the gig economy , and of his SEIU acolyte David Rolf , who has recently made a name for himself arguing that unions and collective bargaining are obsolete .
Yet the strategy they employed in home care had its merits : Using @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , publicly subsidized child care workers ) wasn ’ t intrinsically wrong ; the problem was the lack of deep , complementary organizing .
McAlevey is right that a whole worker approach is needed to create lasting strength , but in a given campaign , for a given set of workers , the precise alchemy and sequence of organizing , mobilization , and advocacy may vary.26 This might be said of the Fight for $ 15 in fast food , a more recent legislation-heavy SEIU effort that McAlevey has criticized for privileging one-day @ @ @ @ @ @ @ It ’ s true that the campaign has yet to produce a union , but given the rapid turnover and poverty endemic to workers in the fast food industry , it isn ’ t clear how to organize them without first attempting to stabilize their lives .
Raising the floor through legislation may be a critical first step toward finding a more durable collective form.27 The case of low-wage immigrant workers further illustrates the inadequacy of a one-size-fits-all model .
Workers may bring their own ideas , inflected by culture and life experience @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gain leverage in a particular industry or community .
They may also have no choice but to experiment , especially in sectors with large numbers of undocumented immigrants or in workplace structures stubbornly resistant to traditional unionization .
McAlevey does not identify restaurants , nail salons , day labor corners , or private homes as strategic sites for organizing , but the workers in these spaces and the immigrant worker centers supporting them have developed their own ways to win self-determination and power.28 Immigrant workers also remind us of the importance of transnational @ @ @ @ @ @ @ organizing , born of a less economically complex , less globalized era , does not necessarily take into account .
In A Collective Bargain , McAlevey describes globalization as a convenient fiction , a way for American corporations to justify moving businesses from the unionized North to the right-to-work South or out of the country altogether .
The rhetoric of globalization has certainly been used to enable union busting and profiteering overseas , but this only means that our scope of organizing must grow to match the ambitions of capital.29 Describing the drift @ @ @ @ @ @ @ McAlevey writes , “ As I drove to Nogales , I could smell the toxic exhaust emanating from U.S.-owned factories just outside the reach of much stricter laws stateside… .
I understood that the free in free trade meant the freedom to pollute the planet , pay extremely low wages , and be exempt from all duties and obligations to society .
American workers didn ’ t stand much of a chance competing against these conditions , and neither did the planet.
” The villain is obvious—opportunistic American bosses—but by highlighting the chasm @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a foreign landscape free of “ duties and obligations , ” McAlevey both overestimates working conditions stateside and pays inadequate attention to labor conditions across the border.30 Elsewhere in the book , discussing labor conditions in China , McAlevey notes that most Chinese unions are jointly run by corporations and the state .
From this , she concludes there ’ s no labor movement in the country and extends this conclusion to the entire continent .
“ Do you wonder why CEOs of Asian companies can say what they like about their workers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ countries are so explicitly repressed : they aren ’ t allowed to use an independent Internet search engine to read stories of workers forming unions in places where the government doesn ’ t attack them , ” she writes .
McAlevey should have spoken with people who know this terrain or should have at least given the topic a vigorous Google search , as there are countless workers , organizers , and lawyers struggling for fair wages and safe conditions across Asia , even in authoritarian countries .
Consider the many strikes and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unions tracked by China Labour Bulletin or the activities of the anti-militarist Confederation of Trade Unions of Myanmar , which , along with the AFL-CIO , is an affiliate of the International Trade Union Confederation.31 These sections of A Collective Bargain suggest that , while CIO-style whole worker organizing has been critical to fostering radical , strike-ready unions , it can also nudge members to turn inward and protectively hoard their gains .
This is a problem not only in light of our globalized economy , climate change , and the coronavirus pandemic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ our goal is to build a sturdy welfare state .
Something is missing in an approach that leads the United Auto Workers to strike for the closure of General Motors plants in Mexico or compels Unite Here to condemn Medicare for All .
Whole worker organizing is necessary but insufficient ; we must also enlarge the valence of our community.32 On the one hand , it ’ s unfair to expect one book and one author to do it all .
On the other , A Collective Bargain travels down enough tangents that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
How can we connect shop floor organizing to global justice ?
Is it possible to bolster employment-based rights and benefits and tear down capitalism at the same time ?
And what does a movement of American workers mean in the context of US hegemony and an increasingly interdependent world ?
33 McAlevey concludes her book with a warning : “ Nothing can rebuild a progressive , ground-up base like a strike-ready union… .
The choice is clear : build good unions , undo Taft-Hartley , and enable robust collective bargaining and strikes… @ @ @ @ @ @ @ our own democracy is hard enough , but what good is a fortified island in a thrashing sea ?
34

This article appears in the May 18/25, 2020 issue.
In 2018, I was back home in the Seattle area, trying to understand the new texture of the place. There had always been pockets of wealth concentrated around high-tech companies like Boeing and Microsoft. But now, both in atmosphere and dollars, Greater Seattle had begun to feel like an Amazon company town. I wanted to know how non-engineers were getting by and whether longtime residents, low-wage workers, and newly transplanted coders could find common ground.1 Books in Review A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy By Jane McAlevey Buy this book
I began to sit in on meetings of the Workplace Organizing Collective, a group convened by the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. The facilitators were current and former union organizers, but most of the people who attended knew little of the labor movement. They were baristas and retail clerks, food service workers and engineers. They went to commiserate and to brainstorm solutions to unequal pay, abusive managers, and schedules that spun their homelives into chaos. The tech workers also raised larger-scale grievances such as unethical outsourcing and violations of privacy.2
At one of these meetings, a man named Ira Pollock gave a presentation. He was a recent transplant from New York, where he’d taught ballroom dance lessons and gotten involved in socialist politics. Now he was working at a UPS sorting facility in South Seattle, moving containers of boxes and driving a forklift. The plant had long been unionized under the Teamsters, but as he told the group and then me in a separate interview, “There was no shop steward. My coworkers were all part-time, and no calls were made to the union. They mostly didn’t even know the local.”3
Pollock began organizing his coworkers, not for a new union but to give meaning to the one they had. He befriended the people on his shift and encouraged them to come up with a list of shared demands: relief from the smoke when fires raged across western Washington and more staffing to cover spikes in cargo. He and his colleagues started to act together in ways big and small—signing petitions, pacing themselves on the job, and taking regular breaks so as not to let themselves be overworked. “After that, management started staffing us,” Pollock told me.4
Their manual was No Shortcuts, a 2016 book by the union strategist Jane McAlevey. In it she argued that gradual “whole worker organizing” and strikes, as opposed to quick, telegenic “mobilizations,” can transform not only individual plants and offices but the country as a whole. Pollock explained to the group in Seattle how he implemented this approach, creating maps of his workplace and community, identifying “organic leaders,” and guiding his coworkers through increasingly demanding “structure tests” that built their confidence and collective power. The room seemed as awed by Pollock as he was by McAlevey.5 Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
In recent years, McAlevey, now a senior policy fellow at the UC Berkeley Labor Center (and the strikes correspondent for The Nation), has drawn an enthusiastic following among activists, especially those in the DSA. She wrote her first book, a 2012 memoir and love letter to organizing titled Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell), after staff jobs at the AFL-CIO and the Service Employees International Union and, in a testament to her drive, while being treated for cancer. Then came No Shortcuts, an outgrowth of her dissertation in sociology at the City University of New York, where she studied with Frances Fox Piven. When the book went to press, McAlevey had no reason to believe that we would witness a resurgence in organizing and strikes. Yet in 2018 and 2019, hundreds of thousands of workers joined unions or walked off the job, provoked by decades of austerity, a blitz of union-hobbling court decisions, and Donald Trump’s election. No Shortcuts became an organizing bible for many, rivaling such classic guides as Labor Law for the Rank & Filer and A Troublemaker’s Handbook.6
McAlevey’s latest book, A Collective Bargain, arrives in a new moment of danger and rebellion. The author’s signature arguments are all here, but in the form of a primer on labor and democracy and framed for a general audience. She wrote the book in a rush (just 45 days, she says in the acknowledgments), and the loosely structured content reflects this haste: a mix of organizing shop talk, myth busters, interviews, case studies, and commentary on everything from Silicon Valley and Chinese manufacturing to employment case law and gun violence. But that’s mostly beside the point. McAlevey’s influence is such that the book, like her first two, is certain to be passed from hand to hand—and what more could an author ask for?7 Current Issue View our current issue
McAlevey started out as an environmental activist, first with the Earth Island Institute in California and then at the Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee. She advocated for Central Americans harmed by the US military and worked in communities of color facing disproportionate pollution. But after nearly a decade, she grew tired of the environmental movement’s frequent default to publicizing issues instead of organizing people. After a stint in philanthropy, she was recruited by the AFL-CIO and trained at SEIU 1199 Northeast, a large health care union known for its communist roots and commitment to rank-and-file power. There she absorbed two basic principles of organizing: first, to see workers as human beings, embedded in families and neighborhoods, and second, to use these personal and cultural ties to build clout in strategic industries.8
The model of whole worker organizing was in fact the preferred strategy of the Congress of Industrial Organizations from its founding in 1935 to the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947. The CIO opposed the American Federation of Labor’s practice of sorting workers into separate craft-based guilds (for carpenters, pipe fitters, and so on), which sliced up the labor movement and excluded those with less bargaining power. Thus while the AFL spent its resources protecting highly skilled workers and trying to influence the emerging labor-law regime, CIO activists coordinated large-scale strikes and organized hundreds of thousands of manufacturing, mining, steel, and needle trade workers, including immigrants, African Americans, and women. These remarkable gains were slowed, however, during World War II, then quashed by the Taft-Hartley Act.9
For McAlevey, the 12 golden years of the CIO before Taft-Hartley retain a near mystical power, and she has tried to replicate whole worker organizing wherever she goes. In Connecticut she led the AFL-CIO’s Stamford Organizing Project, a citywide multiunion campaign that aimed not only to unionize nursing-home workers and janitors but also to protect affordable housing. In Las Vegas and Reno, she helped revive a moribund SEIU health care local and recruited thousands of new, strike-ready members from multiple hospitals. It’s clear from Raising Expectations that McAlevey and her staff organized down to the bone—enough to know every worker’s network of friends, hobbies, clergy, and family members.10
If this is real organizing, then what isn’t? In No Shortcuts, McAlevey distinguished whole worker organizing from two other modes of union activism—advocacy (lawsuits, legislation) and mobilization (public relations campaigns, protesters wielding picket signs)—and applied this three-part framework to a range of case studies, including the Chicago Teachers Union and its historic strike in 2012, a pork-factory union in rural North Carolina, and the nonunion immigrant worker center Make the Road New York. What we call organizing and imbue with street cred or back-patting self-acclaim, McAlevey argued, often constitutes little more than political performance. To win, she wrote, unions need to spend less time and money on advertising and litigation and much, much more on targeted workplace campaigns.11 Related Article The Promise of a Universal Basic Income—and Its Limitations Bryce Covert
The Smithfield Foods saga proved her point especially well. For more than a decade, the United Food and Commercial Workers had tried to unionize the Tar Heel, North Carolina, pork plant using every mechanism of the National Labor Relations Act. But at each juncture, Smithfield flouted the law, going so far as to assault workers and deploy “their own police force dressed in riot gear” to suppress voting in a union election. The UFCW filed complaint after complaint, but the National Labor Relations Board failed to enforce the NLRA, and the case languished in the federal courts. This would have been the end, if not for a shift at union headquarters. In 2006 new leaders at the UFCW decided “to go all out to win at Smithfield, and to do it by radically changing their strategy.” They recruited a shop floor organizing committee, charted “social networks among the workers,” designed a series of “escalating ‘in-plant’ direct actions,” including a May Day strike, and with the help of outside activists like the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, built local, state, and national consumer campaigns against the company—a potent mix of organizing and mobilization. Finally, in 2008, 5,000 Smithfield employees voted to join the UFCW.12
The Tar Heel union did more than represent its members, McAlevey argued in No Shortcuts; it became a base of political support for health care access, immigrant rights, and fair wages “in a key national electoral swing state that still has the lowest unionization level in the United States.” Workplace democracy, in other words, could produce a larger democracy for all.13
The tie between a sturdy union and a sturdy republic goes from being a secondary theme in No Shortcuts to the central thesis of A Collective Bargain. McAlevey dedicates her new book “to all the brilliant people who went on strike in 2018 and 2019…raising expectations that life should and can be better.” In the course of seven chapters—with titles like “Who Killed the Unions?,” “Everything You Thought You Knew About Unions Is (Mostly) Wrong,” and “Are Unions Still Relevant?”—she explains why CIO-style organizing is now essential to empower ordinary people and “change the direction of this country.”14
“The experience of a well-executed union campaign,” McAlevey writes, “helps workers understand, on their own, that their employer’s effect on their lives goes beyond assigning them to an overtime shift and preventing them from getting time with their family.” Whole worker organizing reveals “that their employer is part of a bigger system that is contributing to the failure of their kids’ schools, the rollback of anti-pollution and anti-gentrification laws, [and] the gross inequities of the tax system,” which is, in part, why the right has tried so hard to destroy unions. It is also why McAlevey believes that the basic principles of workplace organizing can be applied to electoral politics, housing, and environmental justice.15
As with McAlevey’s first two books, A Collective Bargain is strongest in its dissections of specific labor campaigns. In a chapter on hospital workers and corporate influence in Philadelphia titled “How Do Workers Get a Union?,” she vividly evokes an effort in which she played a direct role. The Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals (PASNAP) hired McAlevey as a consultant in 2016 to help workers at the Einstein Medical Center win union recognition and to negotiate the first citywide contract in several other facilities. Her method at Einstein was simple but slow and granular: to get a supermajority of workers to actively support the union.16
To build this support, McAlevey and her staff mapped out the hospital and identified organic leaders in each department—those who enjoyed the respect of management and held sway with their peers. The Einstein workers had won an NLRB election some weeks earlier, but the vote was close enough to signal weakness. Management responded by filing baseless legal objections and using “an A-level union avoidance firm” to turn employees against PASNAP. Among those turned was a charismatic, widely respected nurse—and indeed, when she tilted “no,” most of her department followed suit.17
McAlevey and her team knew that without this nurse, the union would have little hope of negotiating a strong collective bargaining agreement. They approached her carefully, giving her a copy of the draft contract and appealing to her and her colleagues’ pride—“the same individuality they thought was threatened by the union.” They then persuaded the nurse to meet and walked her “through how negotiations worked in a good union such as PASNAP and how, in a democratic union, all workers were invited and encouraged to attend their own negotiations.” Less than 24 hours later, the nurse returned with 34 signed union cards. An organizer I know summed up McAlevey’s approach as follows: “You have to work the plan. If you work the plan, you will win.”18
Few unions have worked this plan as well as the United Teachers of Los Angeles, which represents 34,000 employees in the LA Unified School District. The UTLA went on strike in January 2019 and won an unusually ambitious, wide-ranging contract that included caps on classroom size, increased staffing by full-time librarians and counselors, pay raises, legal assistance for undocumented students and their families, green spaces, and limits on charter schools—a major political force in California. In the chapter “How to Rebuild a Union,” McAlevey explains how the UTLA got to this point. She traces the victory to 2012, when one of her mentors, the Los Angeles organizer Anthony Thigpenn, partnered with rank-and-file teacher activists to pass a statewide “millionaire’s tax” that restored billions of dollars to the public sector. The teachers involved went on to win control of the UTLA in 2014, electing a “Union Power slate” that, in the words of Alex Caputo-Pearl, now the UTLA’s president, campaigned explicitly on the need for an “organizing union.”19
Through interviews with Caputo-Pearl and others, McAlevey charts how a newly emboldened UTLA led its members through a series of structure tests, escalating actions “done by hand, face-to-face, across nine hundred schools” over four years. In the process of getting workers to attend a rally, sign new membership cards, or agree to pay more dues to fund organizing, the UTLA trained all educators to speak up. Teachers defined their priorities beyond pay and benefits, to target school privatization and the Trump administration’s abuse of migrants. Community concerns became union concerns and gave teachers the public backing they needed to win in 2019.20 Related Article A Witness to the Rise of Big Data Kevin Lozano
Writing about the UTLA, McAlevey makes the work of checklists and “one on ones” feel high stakes and urgent. And she adds a structural analysis, arguing that education and health care are crucial strategic sectors, priority “growth industries” that are not easily offshored. Because these workers “are hard to replace [and] have a kind of moral authority in mission-driven work,” she says, they possess the “capacity to hold the line on corporate greed.”21
The downside of a book intended to inspire is that it omits the campaigns that failed, those in which whole worker organizing didn’t succeed. Surely there are times when, no matter how well union organizers chart a community or identify organic leaders or treat workers as networked organisms, they lose anyway. Reading A Collective Bargain, I wondered what we might learn from such campaigns and whether some contexts, such as construction day labor and informal domestic work, might require an alternative to CIO-style organizing.22
One way of considering these questions is through a comparison of McAlevey’s whole worker approach with that of her old boss Andy Stern, who was the president of the SEIU. In the late 1990s he and a group of SEIU leaders developed a plan to unionize workers in fast-growing service sectors—and to do so quickly and in large numbers without deep organizing. They began with home care workers, the isolated, mostly female aides who serve housebound, low-income elders and people with disabilities covered by Medicaid. For decades, these home health aides and personal care workers were classified as independent contractors, despite being paid and supervised by state agencies. As a result, they had no right to the overtime pay, workers’ compensation, or collective bargaining that other public sector employees enjoyed. Stern’s idea was not to organize these care workers through a conventional campaign but instead to pass legislation, state by state, that would deem them public employees for purposes of negotiating a union contract.23
In numerical terms, the strategy was brilliant. As collective bargaining bills were signed into law, hundreds of thousands of home care workers gained rights, and the SEIU joined with private home care contractors to force higher Medicaid reimbursement rates from state agencies. Workers saw material improvements, typically in the form of insurance benefits, paid time off, and a bump in their wages to just above the legal minimum. Yet most home health aides developed no meaningful relationship with the union, let alone one another. The SEIU neglected to match its visionary recruitment plan with the daunting but necessary work of door-to-door organizing.24
For McAlevey, Stern and his protégés have long represented a neoliberal turn in union strategy, from real rank-and-file organizing to technocratic mobilization. And she seems to have foreseen the vulnerability of their method: Home care unions eventually became the target of the right-to-work lobby and a business-friendly Supreme Court. In the 2014 case Harris v. Quinn, the court found that aides compensated by Medicaid were only “partial” public employees and therefore could not be required to pay into the cost of union representation. The ruling threatened the viability of home care unions and, by extension, the earnings and working conditions of aides and the welfare of patients. In 2018 the court expanded the holding in Harris to apply to all public sector unions.25
Many people in the labor movement share McAlevey’s criticisms of Stern, who now shills for the gig economy, and of his SEIU acolyte David Rolf, who has recently made a name for himself arguing that unions and collective bargaining are obsolete. Yet the strategy they employed in home care had its merits: Using legislation to unionize aides (and later, publicly subsidized child care workers) wasn’t intrinsically wrong; the problem was the lack of deep, complementary organizing. McAlevey is right that a whole worker approach is needed to create lasting strength, but in a given campaign, for a given set of workers, the precise alchemy and sequence of organizing, mobilization, and advocacy may vary.26
This might be said of the Fight for $15 in fast food, a more recent legislation-heavy SEIU effort that McAlevey has criticized for privileging one-day walkouts and minimum-wage bills over organizing. It’s true that the campaign has yet to produce a union, but given the rapid turnover and poverty endemic to workers in the fast food industry, it isn’t clear how to organize them without first attempting to stabilize their lives. Raising the floor through legislation may be a critical first step toward finding a more durable collective form.27
The case of low-wage immigrant workers further illustrates the inadequacy of a one-size-fits-all model. Workers may bring their own ideas, inflected by culture and life experience, to the question of how to gain leverage in a particular industry or community. They may also have no choice but to experiment, especially in sectors with large numbers of undocumented immigrants or in workplace structures stubbornly resistant to traditional unionization. McAlevey does not identify restaurants, nail salons, day labor corners, or private homes as strategic sites for organizing, but the workers in these spaces and the immigrant worker centers supporting them have developed their own ways to win self-determination and power.28
Immigrant workers also remind us of the importance of transnational ties and cross-border solidarity, which CIO-style organizing, born of a less economically complex, less globalized era, does not necessarily take into account. In A Collective Bargain, McAlevey describes globalization as a convenient fiction, a way for American corporations to justify moving businesses from the unionized North to the right-to-work South or out of the country altogether. The rhetoric of globalization has certainly been used to enable union busting and profiteering overseas, but this only means that our scope of organizing must grow to match the ambitions of capital.29
Describing the drift of manufacturing across the US-Mexico border, McAlevey writes, “As I drove to Nogales, I could smell the toxic exhaust emanating from U.S.-owned factories just outside the reach of much stricter laws stateside…. I understood that the free in free trade meant the freedom to pollute the planet, pay extremely low wages, and be exempt from all duties and obligations to society. American workers didn’t stand much of a chance competing against these conditions, and neither did the planet.” The villain is obvious—opportunistic American bosses—but by highlighting the chasm between “stricter” US laws and a foreign landscape free of “duties and obligations,” McAlevey both overestimates working conditions stateside and pays inadequate attention to labor conditions across the border.30
Elsewhere in the book, discussing labor conditions in China, McAlevey notes that most Chinese unions are jointly run by corporations and the state. From this, she concludes there’s no labor movement in the country and extends this conclusion to the entire continent. “Do you wonder why CEOs of Asian companies can say what they like about their workers? Because the workers in some Asian countries are so explicitly repressed: they aren’t allowed to use an independent Internet search engine to read stories of workers forming unions in places where the government doesn’t attack them,” she writes. McAlevey should have spoken with people who know this terrain or should have at least given the topic a vigorous Google search, as there are countless workers, organizers, and lawyers struggling for fair wages and safe conditions across Asia, even in authoritarian countries. Consider the many strikes and organizing efforts outside the structure of formal unions tracked by China Labour Bulletin or the activities of the anti-militarist Confederation of Trade Unions of Myanmar, which, along with the AFL-CIO, is an affiliate of the International Trade Union Confederation.31
These sections of A Collective Bargain suggest that, while CIO-style whole worker organizing has been critical to fostering radical, strike-ready unions, it can also nudge members to turn inward and protectively hoard their gains. This is a problem not only in light of our globalized economy, climate change, and the coronavirus pandemic but also in the United States if our goal is to build a sturdy welfare state. Something is missing in an approach that leads the United Auto Workers to strike for the closure of General Motors plants in Mexico or compels Unite Here to condemn Medicare for All. Whole worker organizing is necessary but insufficient; we must also enlarge the valence of our community.32
On the one hand, it’s unfair to expect one book and one author to do it all. On the other, A Collective Bargain travels down enough tangents that my expectations were, well, raised. How can we connect shop floor organizing to global justice? Is it possible to bolster employment-based rights and benefits and tear down capitalism at the same time? And what does a movement of American workers mean in the context of US hegemony and an increasingly interdependent world?33
McAlevey concludes her book with a warning: “Nothing can rebuild a progressive, ground-up base like a strike-ready union…. The choice is clear: build good unions, undo Taft-Hartley, and enable robust collective bargaining and strikes…. Otherwise, democracy ends.” Fixing our own democracy is hard enough, but what good is a fortified island in a thrashing sea?34


thenation--2020-05-05--The Worlds of Edward Said

The Worlds of Edward Said

Seventeen years after his death , Edward Said remains a powerful intellectual presence in academic and public discourse , a fact attested to by the appearance of two important new books .
After Said , edited by Bashir Abu-Manneh , offers assessments of Said ’ s vast body of scholarship by a dozen noted writers and academics .
The Selected Works of Edward Said , 1966–2006 , edited by Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin , two former students , is an expanded version of The Edward Said Reader , which was published a few years before his death in 2003 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ picture of Said ’ s breadth and influence as a public intellectual ; the new collection is more than 150 pages longer and includes eight essays that didn ’ t appear in the earlier volume , plus a new preface and an expanded introduction .
The newly included essays range from overtly political sallies to reflective meditations on the “ late style ” in music and literature that were published posthumously .
Some of them , like “ Freud and the Non-European , ” reflect concerns that preoccupied him toward the end of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ complex and subtle of his writings .
Others remind us how widely read he was , how broad his interests were , and how penetrating his insights could be .
Coupled with the reflections on his major works in After Said , they also give the reader a sense of the consistency of his politics , imbued with a universalist and cosmopolitan humanism that sat at the center of his literary and political writings.1 After Said : Postcolonial Literary Studies in the Twenty-First Century The Selected Works of Edward Said , 1966–2006 It @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are still reading and grappling with Said ’ s ideas .
His extensive oeuvre includes 25 books , many of them monuments in their field , such as Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism .
He was the founding father of an entire academic domain—postcolonial studies—that has thrived despite a certain critical distance toward it on the part of its putative parent .
In his 40 years at Columbia University , Said mentored numerous scholars , many of whom hold prominent positions today in literature and other departments throughout the Anglo-American academy , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ far , leaving its mark on the study of the Middle East , anthropology , and art history .
Forty-two years after its publication , his most influential work , Orientalism , is still widely taught to undergraduate and graduate students around the world.2 Over those four decades , Said became probably the most eminent public intellectual of his generation , producing a wealth of essays , articles , and long interviews ( on everything from Middle Eastern politics to classical music and psychoanalysis ) and writing for a broad general readership as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ public involvement ranged from contemporary affairs to debates about the history of empire , but it was most pronounced where Palestine was concerned .
Through his writings , his media appearances , and his activism , Said did more than anyone else to make the question of Palestine better understood in North America .
Although this advocacy earned him many admirers in the United States and the rest of the world , including among Palestinians , it also earned him powerful enemies in the academy , the media , and elsewhere .
Nonetheless @ @ @ @ @ @ @ decades since his death , it is clear that their enmity has done little to diminish his legacy or the immediacy and relevance of his ideas.3 Edward Said was born in British-ruled Palestine and grew up in Cairo at a time when Egypt was nominally independent .
He was initially schooled in an educational system deeply marked by British colonial influence .
The name of an elite institution he was expelled from , Victoria College , tells it all , and struggling to fit in , he also spent parts of his youth @ @ @ @ @ @ @ family lost homes , businesses , and property in Jerusalem as a result of the Nakba in 1948 , and although the young Said was somewhat cushioned from the material consequences , these events had a considerable impact on him—as did the neocolonial political , social , and cultural environments in which he grew up.4 Said was sent to the United States to complete his high school education at a New England prep school , which he graduated from in 1953 .
Then he enrolled at Princeton , where he studied under the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and completed a PhD at Harvard , writing on his fellow exile Joseph Conrad .
Said was , for all intents and purposes , a fairly conventional scholar at that point , winning a coveted appointment in the English and comparative literature department at Columbia in 1963 and publishing a book on Conrad and the autobiographical element in his novels .
But world events—in particular the Israeli-Arab War in 1967—marked a transformative moment for him .
Witnessing these developments both from afar in New York and in Lebanon during summers with his family @ @ @ @ @ @ @ between what was happening in the Middle East and how it was depicted in the West .
This realization informed nearly all of the work that followed : first with Orientalism , published in 1978 , and then with The Question of Palestine the next year.5 What made Said ’ s writing so revelatory for nonspecialists was how his arguments broadened our horizons and constantly challenged our assumptions .
He did this in person as well—in conversations with friends , in lectures , and in seminars filled with attentive students .
My brother @ @ @ @ @ @ @ introduced me to Said in the years after 1967 as we all absorbed the shock and the consequences of that year ’ s war .
Soon I discovered that as much of a pleasure as it was to read Said , it was an even greater pleasure to listen to him .
One was drawn into a wide-ranging conversation about literature , music , philosophy , philology , and politics , all illuminated by the extraordinary sense of urgency that seemed to drive him from very early on .
His capacious range and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and politics was inflected by his strong personal commitments , which made his work far richer and more interesting than that of any other theorist or literary scholar then writing in the Anglo-American academy .
Part of its lasting appeal , in fact , is that it continues to speak to us in much the same fashion : blending a broad , interdisciplinary humanistic knowledge with attention to pressing global concerns.6 Said ’ s 1997 essay “ On Lost Causes ” in the Selected Works offers a wonderful example of this .
It @ @ @ @ @ @ @ late novels by Miguel de Cervantes , Jonathan Swift , Gustave Flaubert , and Thomas Hardy to a coruscating critique of the Oslo Accords as a defeat for the Palestinians , one that led many to believe that Palestine was a lost cause .
The essay is suffused with a sense of melancholy : The reader knows that in writing about these authors ’ novels , Said was likely penning an essay that would count among his own final works .
Refracting his disappointment with the outcome of the Palestinian liberation struggle in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pessimism of Cervantes , Swift , Flaubert , and Hardy , Said provided a much more illuminating assessment of the post-Oslo landscape than any ordinary political essay could have—and he did so while shining a light on the four novels as well .
Very few literary critics and professors of literature wrote like this then , and even fewer do so today.7 The best articles in the excellent After Said exhibit the same combination of literary fluency and political acuity .
Bashir Abu-Manneh ’ s introduction astutely stresses the centrality of politics to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ entire career—a judgment that is fully borne out by a careful reading of the eight new essays in the Selected Works .
Abu-Manneh helps us better understand Said ’ s political evolution , noting the impact on him and an entire Arab generation of the 1967 war and how it spurred his turn to overtly political writing on Palestine and the Middle East .
Abu-Manneh adds that this impact “ marked everything Said did afterward , ” leading him to become “ his generation ’ s most influential cultural critic of empire ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and oppressed , ” all based on “ his firm anti-imperial principles.
” 8 This post-1967 awakening constituted a remarkable shift for a conventionally trained literary critic whose first two books , Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography and Beginnings : Invention and Method , gave little indication of what was to come .
Said ’ s new political orientation infuriated many of his contemporaries , in particular those offended by his advocacy for the Palestinian cause and his critique of American imperialism , as well as those who disliked his insistence @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , humanism were to have value , they would have to be infused with an appreciation of context , worldliness , and the political stakes of all cultural expressions .
By demanding that Palestinians be allowed “ permission to narrate ” their own history , in the words of another of his famous essays , Said challenged a hegemonic narrative fashioned over many decades that replaced Palestine with Israel and entirely ignored or systematically denigrated the Palestinian people .
In so doing , Said reopened the question of Palestine , which opponents of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
They could never forgive him for this , and their hostility pursued him for the rest of his life—and continues to do so beyond the grave.9 Although the turning point in Said ’ s thinking was spurred by the 1967 war , it first became visible in a spate of publications in the late ’ 70s and early ’ 80s with the appearance of Orientalism , The Question of Palestine , and Covering Islam .
In Said ’ s earlier works , one can discern some of the features that made his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sympathy for and identification with Conrad , for example , was at least partly a recognition by one multilingual exile writing in a language that was not his mother tongue of the similarities in the trajectory of another such exile .
Like Conrad , Said sensed himself to be in some way out of place , which was not coincidentally the title of his 1999 memoir .
Also like Conrad , Said was intimately aware of the world outside his immediate one .
This sense of alienation and worldliness proved to be a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a far wider and more diverse set of perspectives than his peers .
He could see what others rooted in “ the West ” often could not—especially about Western culture.10 Said ’ s alienation and worldliness were at the heart of the complexity and richness of his work ; they lent him a sharper awareness of and sympathy for other cultures and stirred inside him a pointed disdain for the placid provincialism and monoglot lack of reflection among many leading figures in the American academy .
Although he shared the class and educational @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he insisted that we see beyond the parochial bounds of the ivory tower and the self-referential culture of the West .
While this critical attitude was expressed most saliently in Orientalism , it characterized much of Said ’ s mature work , both critical and political .
In one of his last offerings , “ The Return to Philology ” ( on what he called this “ most unmodern ” branch of learning ) , his erudite analysis is informed by a sense of the larger stakes of the specific political moment : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ State Madeleine Albright ’ s casual dismissal in 1996 of the thousands of Iraqi deaths in that decade as a result of US-mandated sanctions.11 Said deftly interlaced philosophy and literature with political critique .
Although his political writings could be blunt , even scalding , he most often wielded a sharp scalpel in his criticism and did so with elegance and élan .
The best of the essays in After Said do likewise , often using literary analysis to make subtle political points .
At the same time , they avoid the hagiography @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the works on Said .
Both Abu-Manneh ’ s introduction and Robert Spencer ’ s “ Political Economy and the Iraq War ” question the lack of an underpinning in political economy in Said ’ s writing on imperialism in general and on recent US policy in the Middle East in particular , although they do so while underscoring the lasting value of his interventions.12 Similarly , Vivek Chibber ’ s “ The Dual Legacy of Orientalism ” offers one of the most acute and fair-minded expositions of the flaws in what he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Although he notes the distance between Said ’ s “ profound commitment to humanism , universal rights , secularism , and liberalism ” and the disavowal or at least skepticism of postcolonial theory toward these values , Chibber writes that Orientalism “ prefigured , and hence encouraged , some of the central dogmas of postcolonial studies.
” While Said ’ s analysis brought a sophisticated critique of imperialism to the mainstream , Chibber observes , it fed an approach that undermined that very critique by excising its economic dimensions—a point that serves @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this collection .
Although Said is one of this era ’ s fiercest critics of imperialism , missing from his analysis is a grounding in political economy , a failing that robbed his critique of some of its potential force and gave license to his postcolonial followers to move away from Marxism.13 Equally penetrating is the analysis by Seamus Deane in his essay on Culture and Imperialism .
Sympathetic to Said ’ s commitment to Palestine , to his harsh reading of the depredations of imperialism , and to his opposition to the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ traces some of the shortcomings in his ambiguous attitude to anti-colonial violence .
Contrasting Said ’ s views with those of Fanon , Deane points to “ a willed mystification about the question of violence ” throughout Said ’ s writings.14 Attempting to understand why he was so uncomfortable writing in more direct terms on the vexed question of anti-colonial violence , Deane notes that Said was likely “ severely compromised ” by living in a country where a virulent bias against Muslims , Arabs , and especially Palestinians had led ( and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ code their acts of violence as “ terrorism.
” 15 Deane is equally thoughtful in analyzing Said ’ s intervention in the so-called culture wars toward the end of Culture and Imperialism , arguing that by focusing on such a trivial matter , he marred the conclusion of his groundbreaking book .
Ultimately , Deane observes wryly , Said ’ s effort to “ woo the American academy by means of culture ” into opposing imperialism was as fruitless as “ cajoling a cat into altruism.
” 16 If many of the essays @ @ @ @ @ @ @ often critical engagement with his work , there are several that also extend the power of his insights and political vision .
In “ Said and the ‘ Worlding ’ of Nineteenth-Century Fiction , ” Lauren Goodlad points out that , as even friendly critics have conceded , Culture and Imperialism often disconnects questions of empire from those relating to the globalization of capital , but she then makes a compelling case that the book still performed a major service by helping to “ deprovincialize ” European literature and culture .
Whatever flaws @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of empire—his assertion , for example , that imperialism is driven by an “ almost metaphysical obligation to rule ” —he still shined a powerful spotlight on a subject that had been absent from most previous studies of European novels .
By doing so , he not only challenged a smug Eurocentrism that endures in the academy to this day but also redirected his readers ’ attention toward a politics that can help us move past it .
As Jeanne Morefield notes in her contribution to the collection , Said sought to foster @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s yawning maw , ” a liberalism that could confront its tendency to sanction “ destruction and death for distant civilians under the banner of a benign imperialism.
” 17 Like Goodlad and Morefield , Joe Cleary makes a persuasive case for what some of Said ’ s critics miss , with his essay “ Said , Postcolonial Studies , and World Literature.
” He , too , disparages a significant portion of postcolonial theorizing , siding with Said ’ s argument that many of its practitioners have proved “ far more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of favored modes of theory than in the worldly socio-intellectual concerns that had provoked the theories in the first place.
” While Said ’ s peers settled “ into a phase of institutional consolidation…with a fairly predictable canon of modern Anglophone writers , ” Cleary writes , Said , even in the last stages of his illness , “ continued to produce searing essays that testified to his undiminished abilities as a politically committed thinker.
” 18 As After Said and the Selected Works reveal , Said was not only politically committed ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ vision remained , to the end , both worldly and alienated .
He insisted that we see past our own national or parochial cultures in order to better understand them .
He called on us to expand the narrowness of our moral and political imaginations and to see the world in its entirety as our common home .
As an exile as comfortable in New York as in Beirut , Cairo , Paris , or London , he infused his literary style with a cosmopolitan ease and his often urgent politics with a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ antidote to the cloistered and often nationalist chauvinism that seems to be ascendant even in an age of global crises.19 Said ’ s internationalism and cosmopolitan humanism are perhaps his most important legacies .
Human life and its challenges—whether they be pandemics , climate change , perpetual war , or neoliberal policies that impoverish the many to enrich the few—force us past the confines of national or cultural boundaries .
One can only imagine how Said would have responded to the malign forces that have sabotaged the effective handling of these ongoing crises @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Orientalism Today , ” “ the most appropriate thing ” in the face of such folly “ would be to read Edward Said all over again , as though for the very first time.
” 20 The Selected Works and the essays in After Said remind us that it is not enough to produce good ideas and generate critical perspectives today ; we must expand the very horizon of our thinking both geographically and morally .
Ideas and culture must be fought for not only in the cloistered precincts of academia but also @ @ @ @ @ @ @ public arena .
That was what Said , while always the consummate academic , did for his entire career , and it remains a vivid example for others—scholars , writers , students , activists , and ordinary citizens .
Said wrote about the experience of rereading Freud ’ s essays:21 Much the same can be said of Said .
As a literary critic , a teacher , and a political activist , he addressed the world with a passion and commitment that speak to us today.23

This article appears in the May 18/25, 2020 issue.
Seventeen years after his death, Edward Said remains a powerful intellectual presence in academic and public discourse, a fact attested to by the appearance of two important new books. After Said, edited by Bashir Abu-Manneh, offers assessments of Said’s vast body of scholarship by a dozen noted writers and academics. The Selected Works of Edward Said, 1966–2006, edited by Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin, two former students, is an expanded version of The Edward Said Reader, which was published a few years before his death in 2003. The Reader offered us a full picture of Said’s breadth and influence as a public intellectual; the new collection is more than 150 pages longer and includes eight essays that didn’t appear in the earlier volume, plus a new preface and an expanded introduction. The newly included essays range from overtly political sallies to reflective meditations on the “late style” in music and literature that were published posthumously. Some of them, like “Freud and the Non-European,” reflect concerns that preoccupied him toward the end of his life and are among the most complex and subtle of his writings. Others remind us how widely read he was, how broad his interests were, and how penetrating his insights could be. Coupled with the reflections on his major works in After Said, they also give the reader a sense of the consistency of his politics, imbued with a universalist and cosmopolitan humanism that sat at the center of his literary and political writings.1 Books in Review After Said: Postcolonial Literary Studies in the Twenty-First Century By Bashir Abu-Manneh, ed. Buy this book The Selected Works of Edward Said, 1966–2006 By Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin, eds. Buy this book
It is not surprising that so many people are still reading and grappling with Said’s ideas. His extensive oeuvre includes 25 books, many of them monuments in their field, such as Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism. He was the founding father of an entire academic domain—postcolonial studies—that has thrived despite a certain critical distance toward it on the part of its putative parent. In his 40 years at Columbia University, Said mentored numerous scholars, many of whom hold prominent positions today in literature and other departments throughout the Anglo-American academy, and the influence of his scholarship also extends far, leaving its mark on the study of the Middle East, anthropology, and art history. Forty-two years after its publication, his most influential work, Orientalism, is still widely taught to undergraduate and graduate students around the world.2
Over those four decades, Said became probably the most eminent public intellectual of his generation, producing a wealth of essays, articles, and long interviews (on everything from Middle Eastern politics to classical music and psychoanalysis) and writing for a broad general readership as well as his academic peers. His public involvement ranged from contemporary affairs to debates about the history of empire, but it was most pronounced where Palestine was concerned. Through his writings, his media appearances, and his activism, Said did more than anyone else to make the question of Palestine better understood in North America. Although this advocacy earned him many admirers in the United States and the rest of the world, including among Palestinians, it also earned him powerful enemies in the academy, the media, and elsewhere. Nonetheless, at a distance of nearly two decades since his death, it is clear that their enmity has done little to diminish his legacy or the immediacy and relevance of his ideas.3
Edward Said was born in British-ruled Palestine and grew up in Cairo at a time when Egypt was nominally independent. He was initially schooled in an educational system deeply marked by British colonial influence. The name of an elite institution he was expelled from, Victoria College, tells it all, and struggling to fit in, he also spent parts of his youth in Lebanon and Palestine. His well-to-do family lost homes, businesses, and property in Jerusalem as a result of the Nakba in 1948, and although the young Said was somewhat cushioned from the material consequences, these events had a considerable impact on him—as did the neocolonial political, social, and cultural environments in which he grew up.4 Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
Said was sent to the United States to complete his high school education at a New England prep school, which he graduated from in 1953. Then he enrolled at Princeton, where he studied under the critic and poet R.P. Blackmur, and completed a PhD at Harvard, writing on his fellow exile Joseph Conrad. Said was, for all intents and purposes, a fairly conventional scholar at that point, winning a coveted appointment in the English and comparative literature department at Columbia in 1963 and publishing a book on Conrad and the autobiographical element in his novels. But world events—in particular the Israeli-Arab War in 1967—marked a transformative moment for him. Witnessing these developments both from afar in New York and in Lebanon during summers with his family, he came to realize the disjuncture between what was happening in the Middle East and how it was depicted in the West. This realization informed nearly all of the work that followed: first with Orientalism, published in 1978, and then with The Question of Palestine the next year.5
What made Said’s writing so revelatory for nonspecialists was how his arguments broadened our horizons and constantly challenged our assumptions. He did this in person as well—in conversations with friends, in lectures, and in seminars filled with attentive students. My brother, who was a Columbia student, introduced me to Said in the years after 1967 as we all absorbed the shock and the consequences of that year’s war. Soon I discovered that as much of a pleasure as it was to read Said, it was an even greater pleasure to listen to him. One was drawn into a wide-ranging conversation about literature, music, philosophy, philology, and politics, all illuminated by the extraordinary sense of urgency that seemed to drive him from very early on. His capacious range and his application of that knowledge to history and politics was inflected by his strong personal commitments, which made his work far richer and more interesting than that of any other theorist or literary scholar then writing in the Anglo-American academy. Part of its lasting appeal, in fact, is that it continues to speak to us in much the same fashion: blending a broad, interdisciplinary humanistic knowledge with attention to pressing global concerns.6
Said’s 1997 essay “On Lost Causes” in the Selected Works offers a wonderful example of this. It progresses from an extended meditation on four late novels by Miguel de Cervantes, Jonathan Swift, Gustave Flaubert, and Thomas Hardy to a coruscating critique of the Oslo Accords as a defeat for the Palestinians, one that led many to believe that Palestine was a lost cause. The essay is suffused with a sense of melancholy: The reader knows that in writing about these authors’ novels, Said was likely penning an essay that would count among his own final works. Refracting his disappointment with the outcome of the Palestinian liberation struggle in the late ’90s through the grim pessimism of Cervantes, Swift, Flaubert, and Hardy, Said provided a much more illuminating assessment of the post-Oslo landscape than any ordinary political essay could have—and he did so while shining a light on the four novels as well. Very few literary critics and professors of literature wrote like this then, and even fewer do so today.7 Current Issue View our current issue
The best articles in the excellent After Said exhibit the same combination of literary fluency and political acuity. Bashir Abu-Manneh’s introduction astutely stresses the centrality of politics to Said’s criticism and to his entire career—a judgment that is fully borne out by a careful reading of the eight new essays in the Selected Works. Abu-Manneh helps us better understand Said’s political evolution, noting the impact on him and an entire Arab generation of the 1967 war and how it spurred his turn to overtly political writing on Palestine and the Middle East. Abu-Manneh adds that this impact “marked everything Said did afterward,” leading him to become “his generation’s most influential cultural critic of empire” and “a defender of the colonized and oppressed,” all based on “his firm anti-imperial principles.”8
This post-1967 awakening constituted a remarkable shift for a conventionally trained literary critic whose first two books, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography and Beginnings: Invention and Method, gave little indication of what was to come. Said’s new political orientation infuriated many of his contemporaries, in particular those offended by his advocacy for the Palestinian cause and his critique of American imperialism, as well as those who disliked his insistence that if literary criticism and, indeed, humanism were to have value, they would have to be infused with an appreciation of context, worldliness, and the political stakes of all cultural expressions. By demanding that Palestinians be allowed “permission to narrate” their own history, in the words of another of his famous essays, Said challenged a hegemonic narrative fashioned over many decades that replaced Palestine with Israel and entirely ignored or systematically denigrated the Palestinian people. In so doing, Said reopened the question of Palestine, which opponents of Palestinian rights had hoped was permanently closed. They could never forgive him for this, and their hostility pursued him for the rest of his life—and continues to do so beyond the grave.9
Although the turning point in Said’s thinking was spurred by the 1967 war, it first became visible in a spate of publications in the late ’70s and early ’80s with the appearance of Orientalism, The Question of Palestine, and Covering Islam. In Said’s earlier works, one can discern some of the features that made his later writings so powerful. His early sympathy for and identification with Conrad, for example, was at least partly a recognition by one multilingual exile writing in a language that was not his mother tongue of the similarities in the trajectory of another such exile. Like Conrad, Said sensed himself to be in some way out of place, which was not coincidentally the title of his 1999 memoir. Also like Conrad, Said was intimately aware of the world outside his immediate one. This sense of alienation and worldliness proved to be a powerful combination and allowed him to inhabit a far wider and more diverse set of perspectives than his peers. He could see what others rooted in “the West” often could not—especially about Western culture.10
Said’s alienation and worldliness were at the heart of the complexity and richness of his work; they lent him a sharper awareness of and sympathy for other cultures and stirred inside him a pointed disdain for the placid provincialism and monoglot lack of reflection among many leading figures in the American academy. Although he shared the class and educational background of many of his peers, he insisted that we see beyond the parochial bounds of the ivory tower and the self-referential culture of the West. While this critical attitude was expressed most saliently in Orientalism, it characterized much of Said’s mature work, both critical and political. In one of his last offerings, “The Return to Philology” (on what he called this “most unmodern” branch of learning), his erudite analysis is informed by a sense of the larger stakes of the specific political moment: the war in Iraq and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s casual dismissal in 1996 of the thousands of Iraqi deaths in that decade as a result of US-mandated sanctions.11 Related Article John Berger’s Life Between Art and Politics Bruce Robbins
Said deftly interlaced philosophy and literature with political critique. Although his political writings could be blunt, even scalding, he most often wielded a sharp scalpel in his criticism and did so with elegance and élan. The best of the essays in After Said do likewise, often using literary analysis to make subtle political points. At the same time, they avoid the hagiography that is unfortunately prevalent in many of the works on Said. Both Abu-Manneh’s introduction and Robert Spencer’s “Political Economy and the Iraq War” question the lack of an underpinning in political economy in Said’s writing on imperialism in general and on recent US policy in the Middle East in particular, although they do so while underscoring the lasting value of his interventions.12
Similarly, Vivek Chibber’s “The Dual Legacy of Orientalism” offers one of the most acute and fair-minded expositions of the flaws in what he nevertheless recognizes as a “great book.” Although he notes the distance between Said’s “profound commitment to humanism, universal rights, secularism, and liberalism” and the disavowal or at least skepticism of postcolonial theory toward these values, Chibber writes that Orientalism “prefigured, and hence encouraged, some of the central dogmas of postcolonial studies.” While Said’s analysis brought a sophisticated critique of imperialism to the mainstream, Chibber observes, it fed an approach that undermined that very critique by excising its economic dimensions—a point that serves as one of the key subtexts in this collection. Although Said is one of this era’s fiercest critics of imperialism, missing from his analysis is a grounding in political economy, a failing that robbed his critique of some of its potential force and gave license to his postcolonial followers to move away from Marxism.13
Equally penetrating is the analysis by Seamus Deane in his essay on Culture and Imperialism. Sympathetic to Said’s commitment to Palestine, to his harsh reading of the depredations of imperialism, and to his opposition to the US war in Iraq, Deane nevertheless traces some of the shortcomings in his ambiguous attitude to anti-colonial violence. Contrasting Said’s views with those of Fanon, Deane points to “a willed mystification about the question of violence” throughout Said’s writings.14
Attempting to understand why he was so uncomfortable writing in more direct terms on the vexed question of anti-colonial violence, Deane notes that Said was likely “severely compromised” by living in a country where a virulent bias against Muslims, Arabs, and especially Palestinians had led (and continues to lead) many to invariably code their acts of violence as “terrorism.”15
Deane is equally thoughtful in analyzing Said’s intervention in the so-called culture wars toward the end of Culture and Imperialism, arguing that by focusing on such a trivial matter, he marred the conclusion of his groundbreaking book. Ultimately, Deane observes wryly, Said’s effort to “woo the American academy by means of culture” into opposing imperialism was as fruitless as “cajoling a cat into altruism.”16
If many of the essays in After Said involve a sympathetic but often critical engagement with his work, there are several that also extend the power of his insights and political vision. In “Said and the ‘Worlding’ of Nineteenth-Century Fiction,” Lauren Goodlad points out that, as even friendly critics have conceded, Culture and Imperialism often disconnects questions of empire from those relating to the globalization of capital, but she then makes a compelling case that the book still performed a major service by helping to “deprovincialize” European literature and culture. Whatever flaws exist in Said’s nonmaterialist understanding of empire—his assertion, for example, that imperialism is driven by an “almost metaphysical obligation to rule”—he still shined a powerful spotlight on a subject that had been absent from most previous studies of European novels. By doing so, he not only challenged a smug Eurocentrism that endures in the academy to this day but also redirected his readers’ attention toward a politics that can help us move past it. As Jeanne Morefield notes in her contribution to the collection, Said sought to foster “a humanism capable of escaping Eurocentrism’s yawning maw,” a liberalism that could confront its tendency to sanction “destruction and death for distant civilians under the banner of a benign imperialism.”17
Like Goodlad and Morefield, Joe Cleary makes a persuasive case for what some of Said’s critics miss, with his essay “Said, Postcolonial Studies, and World Literature.” He, too, disparages a significant portion of postcolonial theorizing, siding with Said’s argument that many of its practitioners have proved “far more invested in insider disputes about the minutiae of favored modes of theory than in the worldly socio-intellectual concerns that had provoked the theories in the first place.” While Said’s peers settled “into a phase of institutional consolidation…with a fairly predictable canon of modern Anglophone writers,” Cleary writes, Said, even in the last stages of his illness, “continued to produce searing essays that testified to his undiminished abilities as a politically committed thinker.”18
As After Said and the Selected Works reveal, Said was not only politically committed; he never really stopped arguing. His vision remained, to the end, both worldly and alienated. He insisted that we see past our own national or parochial cultures in order to better understand them. He called on us to expand the narrowness of our moral and political imaginations and to see the world in its entirety as our common home. As an exile as comfortable in New York as in Beirut, Cairo, Paris, or London, he infused his literary style with a cosmopolitan ease and his often urgent politics with a cosmopolitan humanism—a humanism that remains a potent antidote to the cloistered and often nationalist chauvinism that seems to be ascendant even in an age of global crises.19
Said’s internationalism and cosmopolitan humanism are perhaps his most important legacies. Human life and its challenges—whether they be pandemics, climate change, perpetual war, or neoliberal policies that impoverish the many to enrich the few—force us past the confines of national or cultural boundaries. One can only imagine how Said would have responded to the malign forces that have sabotaged the effective handling of these ongoing crises. As Saree Makdisi proposes in “Orientalism Today,” “the most appropriate thing” in the face of such folly “would be to read Edward Said all over again, as though for the very first time.”20
The Selected Works and the essays in After Said remind us that it is not enough to produce good ideas and generate critical perspectives today; we must expand the very horizon of our thinking both geographically and morally. Ideas and culture must be fought for not only in the cloistered precincts of academia but also out in the world, in the public arena. That was what Said, while always the consummate academic, did for his entire career, and it remains a vivid example for others—scholars, writers, students, activists, and ordinary citizens. Said wrote about the experience of rereading Freud’s essays:21
That we, different readers from different periods of history, with different cultural backgrounds, should continue to do this…strikes me as nothing less than a vindication of his work’s power to instigate new thought, as well as to illuminate situations that he himself might never have dreamed of.22
Much the same can be said of Said. As a literary critic, a teacher, and a political activist, he addressed the world with a passion and commitment that speak to us today.23