![]() “Labor needs network analysis to see where its industrial and technical power is,” Womack argues. Workers in a production or distribution process are usually involved in several technologies that mesh together and which may create weak links or ‘choke points’ that can be used to force concessions from bosses. It often takes industrial research and analysis to uncover this knowledge (often the job of a union’s research department), with the workers’ participation in that analysis being essential. Womack asserts that workers in a production or distribution process are usually involved in several technologies that mesh together and which may create weak links or “choke points” that, because of their centrality in the activities that generate profits, can be used to force concessions from bosses. This can then guide worker organizing, as it has throughout labor history, as in the successful 1936–37 United Auto Workers (UAW) strike at the critical General Motors parts-stamping plants in Flint, Michigan, which led to the key breakthrough in organizing the auto sector. In his research, Womack became interested in “industrially strategic positions” that held the most power in the production process. Edited by longtime unionists Peter Olney and Glenn Perušek, the book begins with an interview with historian John Womack Jr, who has studied workers and the labor process in Mexico ten labor organizers and scholars then respond with their own thoughts about how the labor movement should organize and build power. In the midst of this dilemma comes Labor Power and Strategy. The labor movement as a whole is growing weaker and less able to exert meaningful power. Employers engage in union busting, and inadequate labor law lets them get away with it. In a country where 71 percent approve of unions and half of nonunion workers want to be a union, the interest among workers is there, but the organizing environment is stacked against unions. In the private sector, it’s at a crisis level of 6 percent. The latest US union membership data is depressing, with only about 10 percent of the workforce formally organized, a proportion getting smaller every year. The question about how to revive a shrinking labor movement has taken on great urgency in recent decades. Review of Labor Power and Strategy by John Womack Jr, edited by Peter Olney and Glenn Perušek (PM Press, January 2023)
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