Homelessness, a growing problem even in the Little Easy

Following is my latest column for Mississippi newspapers. It deals with homelessness in a town that is considered a mecca of prosperity in the nation's poorest state, a state where you find poverty as high as 49.3 percent of the population (in Issaquena County, in the Delta region just north of Vicksburg) and where the governor has threatened to close 10 mental health facilities. Experts say many of the homeless suffer from mental disabilities. Many others are laid-off workers, the jobless poor who populate the lowest rung of our economy. Some, as you'll see, are former convicts. In the accompanying photograph you see Lena Wiley, a local champion of the homeless who heads the Interfaith Compassion Ministry.

OXFORD, Miss. – He’s a convicted felon who served two long terms in Parchman State Penitentiary for selling cocaine, a total of 15 years behind bars, and he came out the last time bound and determined that the rest of his life was going to be different.

“At Parchman, you’ve got rapists, killers, robbers. My cellmate was a guy who had two life sentences, 200 years. He’d cut his girlfriend’s head off.”

The bespectacled, 55-year-old Oxford native speaks matter-of-factly as we talk quietly in a local shop whose good-hearted owner/manager offered him a job. He doesn’t want his name in the papers. He tells how when he turned in his prison stripes, he joined another group of marginalized citizens in these hard economic times: the homeless.

“The people I used to stay with had moved out of town,” he recalls, “and I didn’t want to be around my so-called friends from when I was selling drugs. They never sent me as much as a postcard when I was in prison. I was really feeling depressed.”

So he drifted, one of the growing number of homeless in pretty, pristine Oxford, the boomtown they call the Little Easy, a place so picture-book perfect that an out-of-town guest once asked me, “Where are the poor people?” Yet he himself knows people here living in old cars. A local newspaper has told of a family living in a tent near Sardis Lake.

Eventually, a few good hearts reached out to help the former inmate. He got assistance from the local, church-funded Interfaith Compassion Ministry (ICM), led by the indefatigable Lena Wiley and the only agency in Oxford that still regularly helps the homeless. A church in nearby Water Valley arranged for a temporary home, and people like the shop owner/manager offered him work.

“I feel good right now,” he says. “They gave me a place where I could gather my thoughts, and if it weren’t for them, I’d still be out there selling drugs.”

Homelessness may begin to rival football, Faulkner, and the best boutique buys as a topic of conversation in Oxford’s cafes and coffee shops. A local task force devoted to the issue reports that some 110 families had no roofs over their heads in the city and surrounding Lafayette County during the first seven months of 2009. It found 80 cases of homeless children in Oxford city schools and 172 cases in the county school system.

Between August and mid-November, the task force found 49 homeless families, including 11 children. Forty percent of homeless cases are due to foreclosures, evictions or situations where the families were in uninhabitable structures. Less than 20 percent were transients. The homeless include the mentally ill, victims of house fires, laid-off workers, substance abusers, and former prison inmates. A recent national report showed an estimated one in four homeless are military veterans.

“We do have a problem with homelessness in our community,” task force chair Jean Shaw told the town board of aldermen at a recent meeting, “and the problem is growing.”

Oxford and Lafayette County simply have no room at the inn—or any shelter—for the homeless other than what is temporarily provided by one of the city’s oldest mainstays, the red-roofed, downtown-located Ole Miss Motel.

The motel, fabled in movies and local legend, provides the homeless a shelter for a few nights at a 10-to-15 percent discount off its $40-to-$55-per-night rooms. The ICM pays for the lodging out of donations from local churches. St. John’s Catholic Church recently helped pay off half of a $10,000 bill that the ICM owed.

The motel’s owner and manager, Jack Contractor, a native of India, says he has long had a sympathy for the poor and needy. “I saw a lot of homeless kids in India growing up on the streets. I feel sorry for them. My wife is from Zambia. She saw them, too. If it weren’t for (ICM’s) Lena Wiley, I don’t know what they (the homeless) would do.”

The task force officially disbanded this month but called on the city and county to work with ICM and help fund efforts to relieve a problem that’s bound to grow as winter sets in. Local officials say they’re studying the issue.

Lena Wiley doesn’t have to study the issue. She sees it everyday. “We recently found seven people living in a two-room trailer. It’s a sad situation. It’s not livable. I try not to do a quick fix for the homeless. I try to find a long-term solution. I get a lot of calls.”

Pro-union rulings and lawsuits, anti-union companies in Tennessee and South Carolina, a labor hero wins a much-deserved award, and bus drivers strike

A round-up of recent labor activity in the South shows that a national board ruling may aid workers in organizing at airlines and railroads, FedEx is still fighting efforts to reclassify its drivers as employees and thus make them eligible to join unions, the Boeing Co. plans to open a plant for the 787 jetliner in North Charleston and avoid union labor costs, longtime labor activist Bill Chandler of Mississippi wins a national award for his long fight for social justice, and Mississippi school bus drivers win an agreement after a two-day strike.

The National Mediation Board recently agreed to change a 75-year-old rule that counted a non-vote in a union election as a "no" vote. Under the new rule, only the votes cast are counted, and a majority of "yes" votes mean the union won the election. Hey, what took 75 years to figure that one out? The anti-union camp fears the new ruling--which covers all companies under the Railway Labor Act--could affect outfits like Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines and Memphis-based FedEx.

FedEx is digging in its heels to fight efforts to label its drivers employees rather than independent contractors and thus expose them to possible unionization. The attorney generals in Montana, New York and New Jersey are pursuing legal suits against the company. Meanwhile, the Teamsters are waiting in the wings, and unionized UPS is hoping to be able to say, "Welcome to our world. Be a part of it."

In a valiant, historic victory nine years ago, Charleston, South Carolina, longshoremen (members of International Longshoremen's Association Local 1422 and other unions) defeated a state-backed, battle-clad army of cops and patrolmen as well as an ol' mossback, retrograde, would-be-Strom attorney general named Charlie Condon in preventing a Danish shipping line from hiring non-union dockworkers. Yet anti-unionism is still strong in the cradle of the Confederacy. It's apparently why Boeing wants to open a new assembly line for its 787 jetliner there. North Charleston defeated Everett, Wash., to get the plant despite the company's longstanding ties to the state of Washington.

Bill Chandler, whose long labor career reaches back to even beyond his days working with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers in California, has been named a 2009 Purpose Prize Fellow for his years-long fight on behalf of immigrant workers in the Deep South. The 68-year-old Chandler is executive director of the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance (MIRA), an organization he also helped found. MIRA is a tireless champion of immigrants--whether they have their proper documentation or not. The prize honors social entrepreneurs over 60. Each recipient receives up to $100,000.

By the way, Chandler's organization, MIRA, will join with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) for their 4th annual "Unity Conference" in Jackson, Miss., December 3-5. The conference is titled "Building Bridges Through Diversity: One Goal, One Vision, United Power". MIRA has fought the good fight for years, helping immigrants get their just wages from employers who'd just as soon let them work for nothing, helping the helpless recover from the ravages of Hurricane Katrina and the crooks and shysters who came in its aftermath.

Dozens of school bus drivers in Hinds County (Jackson area), Mississippi, went on a two-day strike for better wages and benefits in late October that resulted in an agreement between Teamsters Local 891 and the Ohio-based First Student company. After media coverage that typically focused on the `disruption' caused by the strike and the `demands' of the bus drivers rather than the issues that led to the strike, the parties resolved their dispute in a compromise from both sides, local union leader Willie Smith said.

Blue Dogs Collecting Cash on the "Long, Strange Trip" of Health Care Reform

If the late Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead were alive today to witness the nation’s health care reform debate, he’d probably say something like this: “What a long, strange trip it’s been, man.”

Wild-eyed, foaming-at-the-mouth citizens shouting down trembling congressmen at town hall meetings, erstwhile vice-presidential hopeful Sarah Palin calling reform proposals “evil” and raising the specter of federal “death panels”, posters depicting President Obama with a Hitler mustache, doctors decrying “socialized medicine”, a South Carolina congressman interrupting Obama’s speech to Congress with “You lie!”

You’d think more unity would exist to fix a $2.2 trillion system that in 2000 ranked a miserable 37th among other nations in the quality of its health care. Before things polarized, polls showed 80 percent of Americans unhappy with a system that was consuming a quarter of the federal budget—not to mention individual budgets—yet leaving 47 million citizens without any health insurance. A 2006 poll showed 56 percent of Americans supporting birth-to-death universal government-backed health care.

Whenever things are bad in this country, they’re worse here in Mississippi, where this writer lives. In the state with the highest poverty rate, 21.2 percent, and the lowest wages for its workers, some 37 percent of the under-65 population was without health insurance during some part of the past year.

The state’s leading politicians, used to such dismal statistics, are dealing with the issue in predictable manner. Gov. Barbour worries that federal efforts to expand Medicaid assistance for the poor might unduly burden the state with extra costs—perhaps even push Mississippi into some real tax reform.

Like most Republicans everywhere, Mississippi Republicans can be relied upon to oppose just about anything Obama supports. They remind me of the old Communists in Poland after they’d lost their power. They had a magazine called Nie! Translation: No!—No to everything the new regime wants.

More interesting is the position staked out by Mississippi’s two leading “Blue Dog” Democrats: Congressmen Travis Childers and Gene Taylor. Both oppose the so-called “public option” that 57 percent of Americans support but which the health care industry has spent $263 million to oppose in Congress. The industry has hired 3,300 lobbyists to sway Congress—or six lobbyists for each member of Congress.

Among those lobbyists are the hired guns of the Breaux-Lott firm in Washington, led by former U.S. Sen. John Breaux, a Democrat from Louisiana, and Mississippi’s own Trent Lott, the most stalwart of Republicans. The firm thus far this year has made over $300,000 lobbying for the big pharmaceuticals concerned about their profit margins.

By the way, health insurance companies saw their profits rise from $2.4 billion in 2000 to $12.9 billion in 2007. Their CEOs earned a neat $118.6 million, or 468 times the average worker’s wages.

Veteran Congressman Taylor of the Gulf Coast has received $535,765 in contributions from the health care industry over the past 20 years. North Mississippi’s Childers, only in Congress since the summer of 2008, has already piled up $165,500 in such contributions.

The Blue Dogs in Congress,“Boll Weevil” descendants and most of them Southerners who often act like Republicans in Democrat clothing, are key to the success or failure of health care reform and thus are recipients of much health care industry largesse these days. According to the Capital Eye Blog, contributions to Blue Dog Democrats from the health care industry are 40 percent higher than what non-Blue Dog Democrats get, and even 16 percent higher than what Republicans are getting. Top Blue Dog Mike Ross of Arkansas is in a bit of a controversy these days because of the pharmacy business that he and his pharmacist wife sold in 2007 at a huge profit to, at least in part, a pharmacy industry executive. The controversy extends to the subsequent political contributions Ross received from that same executive and the health care industry in general.

As all these money transactions take place, the little guy out there continues to get socked with rising health care costs. In fact, health care costs to the average family are twice today what they were 10 years ago, and are expected to double again by 2019.

When you look back across the history of politics in this country—and in the South—maybe this “long, strange” trip isn’t so strange after all.

Hardboiled Champions of the Little Guy

I've been a lover of the hardboiled school of American writing since the 1980s, when I first picked up a copy of Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely. Chandler led me to Dashiell Hammett, who led me to W.R. Burnett's The Asphalt Jungle and James M. Cain. From there I gravitated to Jim Thompson, Cornell Woolrich, and Ross MacDonald. I fell in love with their street-wise, lean-to-the-bone writing style, their edgy, existential view of life, and their empathy with the little guy, the people who get pushed around.

At last, I told myself, here are writers working in an original American style that has the grit and gristle of real life. Like Chandler said in his homage to Hammett, The Simple Art of Murder, these writers tell of a world where "gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities ... where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of money-making."

These were writers with a strong sympathy for the working stiff. In fact, November 2009 will mark the 70th anniversary of the publication of Jim Thompson's Labor History of Oklahoma. Thompson, the most hardboiled of all the hardboiled novelists, had been a hobo, oil rig roughneck, member of the IWW Wobblies, drifter, and avid reader of Karl Marx and Jack London before he made his mark in fiction. He also read the Bible, and agreed with the pro-labor, Depression-era Rev. Lawrence Lay that it was "the poor man's book; its message is the voice of God against tyrants, idlers, and parasites." Read Robert Polito's great biography of Thompson, Savage Art, for the rest of that damned good story.

Dashiell Hammett, author, of course, of The Maltese Falcon, was a Marxist yet a sharp critic of both the Soviet Union and American Communist Party at the same time. He'd been a union buster as a young detective with Pinkerton--once even offered $5,000 to kill the legendary labor organizer and martyr Frank Little. That past haunted him, but he more than made up for it as a supporter of the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War and an enemy and victim of Joe McCarthy's witch-hunt later in life.

James Cain was a labor writer before he became famous as author of The Postman Always Rings Twice. He made a name for himself covering the struggles of coal miners in West Virginia, earning his writing stripes as a hard-nosed reporter covering working people and their lives. Ross MacDonald expressed his sympathies through his fictional detective Lew Archer. In The Ivory Grin, a woman asks Archer, "You are on our side, Mr. Archer?"

"The side of justice when I can find it," Archer responds. "When I can't find it, I'm for the underdog."

Read Cornell Woolrich's premier scholar, Francis Nevins, on that modern-day Poe's view of the Depression: "For Woolrich, (the Depression) means a frightened little guy in a rundown apartment with a hungry wife and children, no money, no job, and desperation eating him like a cancer. The dominant political reality is a police force made up of a few decent cops and a horde of sociopaths licensed to torture and kill, whose outrages are casually accepted by all concerned, not least by the victims."

The list goes on. Two other writers deserve mention. They didn't come out of the genre but are definitely fellow travelers. Nelson Algren, author of The Neon Wilderness and other classics about Chicago's mean streets, once had this to say:

"Behind Business's billboards and Business's headlines and Business's pulpits and Business's press, and Business's arsenals, behind the car ads and the subtitles and the commercials, the people of Dickens and Dostoevsky yet endure."

Maybe the best line goes to an Englishman, Eric Ambler, the author of A Coffin for Dimitrios and a half-dozen other haunting, Angst-laden pre-World War II classics. Writing about war, he said, "It is not important who pulled the trigger, but who paid for the bullet."

I've long been a collector of old hardboiled novels from the '40s, '50s, and later, and you'll see a few of them in the accompanying photograph. These writers left their mark. You see it in the work of modern-day writers like Pete Dexter, William Kennedy, and my friend Ace Atkins (no relation). In fact, read Ace's latest novel, Devil's Garden, which deals with Hammett, Little, and silent film star Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle.

It's an American way of writing about an American way of life.

Father Tobin rails against injustice

RAYMOND, Miss. – Father Jeremy Tobin has come a long way from his old stomping grounds.

The 68-year-old priest, grandson of Irish immigrants, and “Canon Regular” of the nearly 900-year-old Norbertine order grew up in the streets of Chicago, studied the priesthood during the heady Vatican II revolution, and earned his stripes as a social justice crusader during and after the days of rage and protest that were the late ‘60s.

Today he’s one of a half-dozen priests at the Norbertine Priory of St. Moses the Black, a 106-acre refuge devoted both to contemplation and social action, and set so far off the beaten track in the rural woodlands south of Jackson that it takes a act of faith to find it.

“I have a monastic spirituality,” Tobin told me during a recent interview at the priory.

Forgive me, Father, if I raised my eyebrows. The Jeremy Tobin I know is one of the fieriest, most passionate champions of the poor and working class I’ve ever met, proof that the fine old tradition of “labor priests” like Monsignors George Higgins and Charles Owen Rice is alive and well in the Deep South—a tradition given a recent boost in Pope Benedict’s strikingly pro-labor encyclical Veritas in Caritate (“Truth in Charity”).

I had yet to understand that Norbert’s 12th century call to his followers to be “a minister of Christ and servant of the people” means: be prayerful but also active and involved. “O priest, your office is not meant for your personal use,” Norbert told his flock.

Let’s hear a few samples of Tobin’s oratory and Norbertine spirit in speeches to the United Auto Workers and civil rights-era veterans as well as in his monthly column with the Catholic diocesan newspaper, the Mississippi Catholic:

On labor unions: “When workers unite for just and fair wages, for just and humane working conditions, they engage in God’s work.”

On companies that pit workers against workers: “They use foreign labor and cheat the workers, but make citizens feel robbed. It is an old con. … We are not fooled.”

On immigrant workers: “The very symbols and hallowed buildings of America were built by slave labor. … The railroads were built by Chinese laborers. … Were they legal? What is legal? … Slavery was legal, but it was an abomination that split the country, and we still live with its curse. … People are not illegal. Things are illegal.”

On politicians and media personalities who demagogue the immigration issue: “To take the chicken pluckers and semi-literate people from Central America and make them a security risk is the biggest racist scam I know of.”

On civil rights: “The movement is not dead by any means. It is alive and well, and updated to the times. Young people today are committed to the liberation of people of color worldwide.”

On the screaming town hall critics of national health care reform: “It is amazing the level of stupidity out there. We need to start teaching civics in school again.”

Janna Avalon, editor of the Mississippi Catholic, said Tobin provides a needed voice. “He has gone out on a limb on immigrants, wrote about Ted Kennedy (the late senator and noted liberal). I appreciate how he is not afraid to venture into national politics and talk about Catholic leadership.”

For all his fiery oratory and deep-felt commitment to social justice, Tobin is a hail-fellow-well-met kind of guy, quick and easy to laugh and chuckle, his eyes twinkling over his mustache and goatee. He loves Mississippi, his home for the past 11 years, and in his column for the Mississippi Catholic, he often takes time away from serious issues to smell the roses.

“Sometimes I … miss the sirens and the train whistles” of the big city, he once wrote. But “here I am looking out into the woods learning about something I never heard of, muscadine, and getting excited about it, and five kinds of oak, and what you can do with it. … It is never about me, or you. It is about experiencing each day as a special gift from God.”

I’ve got a feeling that old medieval activist Norbert would approve such sentiments.

The peasants and workers in Maxo Vanka's murals still haunt us

With the G-20 world economic summit and national conventions of the AFL-CIO and International Labor Communciations Association taking place in Pittsburgh in September, I thought I'd post a column I wrote from Pittsburgh during the Working Class Studies Association Conference this past June. It deals with the striking Depression-era murals of Croatian artist Maxo Vanka in the St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church in Pittsburgh.

PITTSBURGH, Pa. – Entering the St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church is not for the faint of heart. The church interior is dark, and its walls covered with murals featuring the large-eyed Slavic faces of the Balkan peasants who came to this area a century or more ago to do the back-breaking work that steel mills and coal mines demanded.

As parishioner and preservationist Diane Novosel says, “It’s not your typical pretty church.” St. Nicholas is beautiful, haunting, provocative, but hardly pretty. There’s too much suffering—Mary at the feet of the crucified Jesus, the Croatian mother weeping for her dead son as her other three sons march off to their deaths in the coal mines, the soldier’s mother mourning over her son’s coffin.

The walls of St. Nicholas, a hilltop church in the community of Millvale, bear stark witness to the evils of the world outside—the fire-breathing mills that consumed the hopes and dreams of the immigrants who worked in them, the wars that sent their sons off to die in foreign lands, the greed-filled capitalist dining alone with his stock reports, his servant, and the beggar at his feet.

The 26 murals of St. Nicholas are the work of Croatian artist Maxo Vanka, who painted most of them in a brief frenzy of inspiration during the height of the Great Depression, and, for me, seeing them was a signature moment in my recent visit to this city, which for so long was the embodiment of America’s industrial might.

Once a city of smokestacks, polluted air, and foul rivers, Pittsburgh has reinvented itself into a “green” center whose major industries today are medicine, education, and banking. Downtown sparkles with shiny skyscrapers and bustling streets. Yet, with a population of 300,000, it remains only half its former size, and local folks lament that many of its young are still forced to leave to find jobs the new industries don’t provide.

The monuments to its most-famous industrialists, Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon, seem to be on every corner—universities, libraries, parks, the large, imposing structures that testify to the might of capital. Harder to find are the monuments to the laborers martyred by the brutal excesses of capital and its demands for a workforce willing to work long, hard, mind-numbing hours for near-starvation wages.

I went to the site of U.S. Steel’s old Homestead Works, a 300-acre operation that produced over 200 million tons of steel in its 105-year history and employed at one time 20,000 workers. Silenced since 1986, Homestead was also the site of one of the great labor battles in U.S. history, the 1892 conflict that pitted union steelworkers against an anti-union Carnegie and his armies of Pinkerton agents and state militia. Ten died, many more were wounded, and the workers, despite beating back the Pinkertons, lost.

Today the Pump House where the killing took place is an historical landmark, a modest brick building overshadowed by U.S. Steel’s nearby research and development center.

Near downtown Pittsburgh is an historical marker on a lonely traffic island at the 28th Street crossing, where a militia from Philadelphia fired into a gathering of citizens during a railroad strike in 1877 and killed 20 people. The crowd was protesting wage cuts.

Preservationists fought long and hard for that marker and to keep the Pump House from the wrecking ball.

The artist who created the murals of St. Nicholas was an angry man filled with the kind of righteous indignation that one finds in the great prophets of the Old Testament, the bearded ancients railing against the mighty who, as Jeremiah said, “builds his house on wrong, his terraces on injustice, works his neighbor without pay, and gives him no wages.”

Today, more than a century after the Homestead battle, the history is largely forgotten—or suppressed, yet the mighty still swagger about the land, and the workers are suffering wage cuts and job losses in a faltering economy whose failures they did nothing to cause. Where is the anger of Maxo Vanka? Who’s gathering in the streets to protest the injustice brought about by the rank greed of a few? The streets sometimes seem as empty and forlorn as the little traffic island at the 28th Street crossing.

Maybe they’ll fill on Sept. 24 and 25, when Pittsburgh hosts the G-20 world economic summit. Leaders of the world’s industrial nations will gather to discuss the fate of the global economy. Maybe the spirit of the martyrs of the Pump House or the 28th Street crossing and the anger of Maxo Vanka will be awakened. If so, it won’t be an occasion for the faint of heart.

Labor Update: Savannah co. blamed for explosion, Alabama co. linked to abuses, Memphis worker slowdown, new AFL-CIO chief

Let's take a quick look at some of the recent labor activities and debates around the South and beyond.

Big news came out of Savannah, Georgia, this week when the U.S. Chemical Safety Board issued a report putting the blame squarely on the Imperial Sugar Co. and a foot-dragging U.S. Occupational and Health Administration for the Feb. 7, 2008, explosions and resulting fires that killed 14 and injured dozens of others.

The report said the tragedy was caused by the combustible sugar dust allowed to accumulate at the plant. OSHA waited until this year to finally pass new rules to prevent such hazards. The Savannah Morning News, which has been covering the incident closely, quoted Evan Yeats of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union as saying OSHA's long-delayed action was merely a "public relations maneuver" and that regulations will have no teeth for years to come unless the agency approves an emergency rule in the case.

. . .

The killings of union leaders and other crimes and human rights abuses in the South American nation of Colombia have raised questions about the role of the Birmingham, Ala., coal company, Drummond Co. In fact, this past week the United Steelworkers Union called on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to investigate illegal activities at Drummond's Colombian coal mine.

Labor organizers risk their lives everyday in violence-torn Colombia. Some 400 union members were killed there between 2002 and 2008. Officials and friends of the U.S.-backed Uribe government in Colombia are under investigation for possible connections to some of the killings. Drummond's own role in this murky story has yet to be determined, but a Colombian labor union sued the company in 2002 after three union leaders at its plant were tortured and murdered.

Alabama Power and other companies serving customers in Georgia, Florida, and Mississippi get coal from Drummond.

My good friend Stephen Jackson, associate editor of the Latin American Post in Bogota and a professor of journalism at Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, has been following this case and was even subjected to a gag order issued by a federal judge in a related international tort trial in Birmingham in 2004.

. . .

In Memphis, Tenn., this month, a trash buildup led city public works director Dwan Gilliom to accuse AFSCME Local 1733 members of conducting a work slowdown in protest of recent new additions to their workload. Local 1733 President Ruth Davis deferred comment until she talked with all the members. The city's sanitation workers became part of labor lore in 1968 when they led a strike that brought the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis in a show of support. King was assassinated during that visit.

. . .

The national AFL-CIO elected labor veteran Richard Trumka to take the reins from retiring president John Sweeney this month. After the organization's action during its Pittsburgh conference, Trumka issued a statement calling for a "younger labor movement, a greener labor movement, a labor movement that can project its power to defend workers anywhere in the world, a labor movement that's organizing the unorganized.

My old radical friend in New York City, labor writer and activist Martin Fishgold, editor of The Unionist, AFSCME Local 371,
maintains a healthy skepticism, however. He says any real change in direction by the nation's largest labor organization won't come until it recognizes the need for a renewed sense of militancy in the labor movement and more grassroots involvement by labor leaders themselves in the real lives and challenges of working people.

The crisis in the movement "has been facing organized labor for years, at least since the CIO kicked out the most militant unions in the early 1950s to prove what good Americans we union members all are," Fishgold wrote in a recent exchange on the "labor_communicators@googlegroups.com" listserv in New York. "Corporate unionists are still trying to prove it, to our detriment."