Dana L. Cloud, We Are the Union: Democratic Unionism and Dissent at Boeing (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011).
Dana L. Cloud engages union reformers at Boeing in Wichita and Seattle
to reveal how ordinary workers attempted to take command of their
futures by chipping away at the cozy partnership between union
leadership and corporate management. Taking readers into the central
dilemma of having to fight an institution while simultaneously using it
as a bastion of basic self-defense, We Are the Union
offers a sophisticated exploration of the structural opportunities and
balance of forces at play in modern unions told through a highly
relevant case study.
Focusing on the 1995 strike at Boeing, Cloud
renders a multi-layered account of the battles between the company and
the union and within the union led by Unionists for Democratic Change
and two other dissident groups. She gives voice to the company's claims
of the hardships of competitiveness and the entrenched union leaders'
calls for concessions in the name of job security, alongside the
democratic union reformers' fight for a rank-and-file upsurge against
both the company and the union leaders.
We Are the Union
is grounded in on-site research and interviews and focuses on the
efforts by Unionists for Democratic Change to reform unions from within.
Incorporating theory and methods from the fields of organizational
communication as well as labor studies, Cloud methodically uncovers and
analyzes the goals, strategies, and dilemmas of the dissidents who,
while wanting to uphold the ideas and ideals of the union, took up the
gauntlet to make it more responsive to workers and less conciliatory
toward management, especially in times of economic stress or crisis.
Cloud calls for a revival of militant unionism as a response to union
leaders' embracing of management and training programs that put workers
in the same camp as management, arguing that reform groups should look
to the emergence of powerful industrial unions in the United States for
guidance on revolutionizing existing institutions and building new ones
that truly accommodate workers' needs. Drawing from communication
studies, labor history, and oral history and including a chapter
co-written with Boeing worker Keith Thomas, We Are the Union contextualizes what happened at Boeing as an exemplar of agency that speaks both to the past and the future.
Writing in Labour/Le Travail, Duke University's Michael Stauch call We Are the Union a "valuable contribution to the growing literature on the conflict between union officials and workers they purport to represent." The review in the Journal of American History notes that "Cloud poignantly portrays the exhausting costs of activism—personal, financial, and political," while labor historian Peter Rachleff concludes that We Are the Union "raises vital, critical questions [and] will be a widely read and passionately contested
contribution to contemporary labor history."
Dana L. Cloud is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Texas. Professor Cloud’s research interests lie in the areas of rhetoric and
social movements, critique of representations of race and gender in the
mass media, and the defense of historical materialist theory and method
in communication studies. Her
work has appeared in the scholarly journals Communication and
Critical/Cultural Studies, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Critical Studies
in Media Communication, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, and the Western
Journal of Communication. Among other awards, Dr. Cloud is a recipient of the National Communication Association's Karl Wallace Memorial Award.
Book & Author Links:
University of Illinois Press site.
Q&A with We Are the Union author Dana Cloud
Video of Cloud at Kenneth Foster Rally (YouTube)
University of Texas Video with We Are the Union author Dana Cloud (YouTube)