"We are All Leaders"

"We Are All Leaders"
describes a kind of union qualitatively different from the bureaucratic
business unions that make up the AFL-CIO today. From African American
nutpickers in St. Louis, chemical and rubber workers in Akron, textile
workers in the South, and bootleg miners in Pennsylvania to tenant farmers
in the Mississippi Delta, packinghouse and garment workers in Minnesota,
seamen in San Francisco, and labor party campaigns throughout the country,
workers in the 1930s were experimenting with community-based unionism.
Contributors to this volume
draw on interviews with participants in the events described, first-person
narratives, trade union documents, and other primary sources to tell what
workers of the 1930s did. The alternative unionism of the 1930s was democratic,
deeply rooted in mutual aid among workers in different crafts and work
sites, and politically independent. The key to it was a value system based
on egalitarianism. The cry, "We are all leaders " resonated
among rank-and-file activists. Their struggle, often ignored by historians,
has much to teach us today about union organizing.
CONTRIBUTORS: Rosemary Feurer,
Peter Rachleff, Janet Irons, Mark D. Naison, Eric Leif Davin, Elizabeth
Faue, Michael Kozura, John Borsos, Stan Weir
A volume in the series
The Working Class in American History, edited by David Brody, Alice Kessler-Harris,
David Montgomery, and Sean Wilenz