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THE LABOR MOVEMENT HAS BEGUN TO THINK BIG. SINCE THE NEOLIBERAL TURN OF THE 1970s, organized labor has been losing power, influence, and members. Big problems have prompted debates over big solutions. Today, trade unionists talk of social movement, global justice, and transnational unionisms as strategies to rejuvenate labor's power in the era of globalization. Within the AFL-CIO, recent debates have focused on proposals to consolidate labors power through mergers and bold organizing initiatives. While the movement's current focus on "the global," and on large-scale efforts to reverse the decline are a welcome turn from the business-as-usual unionism of old, a number of unique organizations and activists are already reshaping the labor movement from below. Community unionism is a particularly 'local' response to the global processes that challenge working people today. In these times of renewal, community unionism demands the labor movements attention.1
Since the 1970s, urban labor markets in North America have undergone profound restructuring. Immigration, deindustrialization, and the expansion of service sector employment have significantly altered the urban landscape. For working people, the urban labor market is now characterized by insecurity. The growth of contingent work and forms of nonstandard employment combined with the decline of the welfare state has had a deleterious effect on the working poor and unemployed. Furthermore, neoliberal globalization has negatively affected the capacity of trade unions to organize the unorganized. The rise of contingent work, or precarious employment, challenges traditional forms of trade unionism, and has opened the way for new initiatives, including community unionism.
THE ORIGINS OF COMMUNITY UNIONISM
USE OF THE TERM "COMMUNITY UNIONISM" stretches back to the 1960s. In a 1964 article in Studies on the Left, James O'Connor predicted that in the future, due to long-run unemployment and the deskilling of work, "the social base for working class organizations will lie more and more in the community ... community unions clearly will be the appropriate mode of working class organization and struggle."2 O'Connor argued that "since the poor lacked steady jobs ... the community rather than the workplace was the logical place to organize them."3 This analysis is relevant today as fewer workers find "steady" employment in what neoliberals like to call the "flexible" labor market. O'Connor believed community unions would focus their...