The group of labor unions recently split from the AFL-CIO, called the Change to Win Coalition, will hold its founding meeting on Tuesday, Sept. 27, in St. Louis. For the new coalition of unions to succeed in revitalizing the labor movement, Duke University labor historian Robert Korstad says it will need to expand its focus beyond traditional workplace issues, like fair wages and on-the-job safety, to also include general concerns of the working poor, such as affordable housing, access to health care and quality of public schools.
"Change to Win wants to grow and that means recruiting service workers and non-professional white collar workers, who are often women and minorities," said Korstad, a professor of history and public policy and an adviser to The Labor and Working-Class History Association. "Those people are going to be concerned as much about the value of what their wages are going to buy as about the wages they make.
"The unions are going to need to organize so that they put pressure at the point of production as well as the point of consumption," said Korstad, author of "Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South."
He said the new union group's stance on rebuilding the GulfCoast will give an indication of whether its leadership can articulate a vision for the labor movement that both includes the working poor and is appealing to middle-class citizens who may never join a union but whose support is needed to pass meaningful legislation.
"Are they going to demand that the Gulf Coast rebuilding look like the New Deal or let it be modeled on the reconstruction of Iraq?" he asked.