Book review: Bill Fletcher, Jr.'s 'They're Bankrupting Us! And 20 Other Myths about Unions'

"They're Bankrupting Us!": And 20 Other Myths about Unions
By Bill Fletcher, Jr.
Beacon Press: Boston
224 pages
$10.95 paperback; $8.25 Kindle edition

If the subtitle And 20 Other Myths about Unions makes you think "They're Bankrupting Us!" will be a straightforward affair, offering a few statistics and stories to counter each of its 20 myths, think again. Bill Fletcher, Jr. writes that the genesis of this book was in a conversation he had with a woman on a plane who capped a conversation about the labor-related book he was reading with the question "what's a union?" But this is not Unions for Dummies. Rather, it's a nuanced presentation of, yes, 20 myths about unions and rejoinders to them, but rejoinders that often represent sophisticated efforts at reframing the views implicit in anti-union myths.

Many works in the "this many myths about X" genre aim primarily at arming you with two killer facts per myth, suitable for winning Thanksgiving dinner battle with your conservative uncle. While Fletcher will give you some ammunition for that debate, he'll leave you equally if not more equipped for intense conversation with a political ally on the place of unions and other worker organizing in history and in today's workplace and politics. It's for that'for the response to the myth that union demands are unreasonable that doesn't just say "no and here's why" but rather asks us to consider what we mean by "unreasonable" within the context of the different interests of workers and bosses, for example'that this book should be read.

In the conservative-uncle vein, myth 16, "unions and corporations are both too big and don't really care about the worker," punctures the idea communicated by the term "big labor" that unions and corporations are in any way equivalent in size and sway by pointing out that "SEIU's assets represent a shocking .05 percent of ExxonMobil's market value." It's a number that exposes just how cynical it is to talk about "big labor" in an effort to suggest that unions are somehow too dominant in our economy.

But more typical of the book, Fletcher's discussion of myth 12, "unions are all racist and people of color need not apply," opens like so:

Communities of color have a complicated relationship with organized labor'one that stems from a history that includes examples of courageous interracial/interethnic solidarity on the one hand and intense racial/ethnic antagonism on the other.

To address this charge, It's critical to appreciate three underlying problems: the character of the United States as a political entity, the implications of competition among workers, and social control over workers by the employer class.

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