Building unions: Past, present and future

Your union local or activist community group is doing good work against one corporate assault after another. But your successes aren't making the next campaigns easier. Or challenging public officials who enable corporate usurpations.You're itching to take action.

Whether your passion is organizing unions, ending clear cutting, stopping genetic engineering or nurturing sane industrial transitions, this booklet is for you. Learn how to leave your favorite regulatory agency in the dust; contest corporate denial of people's self-governing authority; reframe single issues as struggles for constitutional rights.

What They Are Saying About this Book:

An unflinching picture of workers fighting against overwhelming odds for justice in the workplace. As Peter Kellman tells it in these pages, workers even have to fight to keep the knowledge of their own struggles alive. This book is a milestone in preserving and sharing that knowledge.---Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States

The story of the Paperworkers' Union with all of its ups and downs set forth in this book provides the backdrop for Peter Kellman to pose the question: 'What is it about organized labor that keeps workers from building a working class movement?' His answer is uncompromisingly honest and will not please many pro-labor people, but tells us what we must do if we are ever to build a truly democratic society.----Ray Rogers, founder of Corporate Campaign, Inc.

Peter Kellman is an activist and a scholar. He played a key role in the Jay Paperworkers' great battle against International Paper in the late 80s, and since then he has learned a great deal about the Paperworkers and the National Labor Relations Act. In this book, he shows how the strike was shaped by labor history and law. It is a fascinating story, well told.----Jack Getman, Earl E. Sheffield Regents Professor at the University of Texas Law School and author of The Betrayal of Local 14: Paperworkers, Politics & Permanent Replacements.

Peter Kellman is a member of the UAW Local 1981 the National Writers Union President of the Southern Maine Labor Council AFL-CIO and sits on the Executive Board of the Maine AFL-CIO. He is currently working on a book about the different theories labor unions have used to promote workers rights.

He was employed for eight years by the Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy doing research, writing and public speaking on the history of corporate power, the struggle to build a democracy and the contradictions between the two.

Kellman spent most of the 1980s working within organized labor on political and strike related activity including the strike in Jay, Maine of 1987-88 where he was a strategist and organizer. His role is documented by Jack Getman in his book The Betrayal of Local 14.

During the 1970s Kellman worked with people on the seacoast of New Hampshire and southern Maine to build the Clamshell Alliance, a group which set the agenda for the anti-nuclear movement of that decade. Also in the 1970s Kellman became involved in the labor movement and was President of Shoe Workers Local 82 in Sanford, Maine.

He was involved in the civil rights movement in 1965-66 and worked for the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee in Alabama. He was also involved in the Anti-War movement, helping to start the anti-draft phase of that struggle.

Matt Wuerker is a political cartoonist based in Washington DC. He's currently the staff cartoonist for a newly launched newspaper/website, Politico.com.

His cartoons have been published widely in all sorts of publications that range from Funny Times, The Nation, and Z Magazine to The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The Christian Science Monitor to name a few. He's also staff "Artiste" for Jim Hightower's Lowdown.

Two collections of his cartoons have been published. Standing Tall in Deep Doo Doo: A Cartoon Chronicle of the Bush/Quayle Years (Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991) and Meanwhile, in Other News: A Graphic Look at Politics in the Empire of Money, Sex and Scandal (Common Courage Press 1998). He also co-authored The Madness of King George (Common Courage Press, 2003).