Work Songs, Bargaining for Work and Family and More from Cool Tools

by Mike Hall, Mar 29, 2009

Our latest edition of Cool Tools includes a look at successful Blue-Green coalitions, working songs from labor’s long musical history and educational resources to help you put vital family life issues on the bargaining table. The AFL-CIO’s Cool Tools assembles the latest hot picks for union activists and allies. (If you can’t locate the items at The Union Shop Online,^TM try Powell’s Books, the nation’s largest union bookstore, or get a list of union stores at The Union Shop Online.^TM)

Union and environmental activists are finding new power and success in the growing Blue-Green movement. University of Florida sociologist Brian Mayer’s new book, Blue-Green Coalitions: Fighting for Safe Workplaces and Healthy Communities, finds that

attempts to build blue-green coalitions are likely to succeed when [workplace and environmental] health is the starting point for finding a common ground.

Mayer takes a close look at a trio of successful alliances: The Alliance for a Healthy Tomorrow in Massachusetts, the Work Environment Council in New Jersey and the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition in California.

Way before MP3s and cell phone tunes, many people got their songs—and musical inspirations—at the workplace. In his book Work Sings, author and jazz pianist, Ted Gioa, examines the rich tradition of work songs of American miners, seamstresses, farm workers, lumberjacks, factory workers, prisoners and cowboys.

Gioa tells some pretty incredible stories of this music that “simultaneously complains and exults, denies and accepts, pushes forward and holds back”—and has provocative ideas about why the tradition has faded away and what may be replacing it.

Also, if you’re looking for strategies on linking family issues such as paid family leave, child care, elder care and flexible work schedules to bargaining and organizing, take a look at the successful curriculum created by the Labor Project for Working Families, “Making it Work Better.” The full training lasts three-and-a- half hours, but you easily can customize it or just extract the sections you need. Download it for free.

Don’t forget to check out the PBS film from its “Independent Lens” series on the New York city housing co-operatives in the 20th century that were among the most fascinating experiments by union workers trying to build a better world. The show airs in April. Check your local listings here.

Cool Tools also links to a review of two current books on the financial meltdown. Journalist Jeff Madrick guides us on a frightening tour of “a financial bubble of tragic proportions in pursuit of personal gain” and says its

deeper cause was a determination among people with political and economic power to minimize the use of government to oversee the financial markets and to guard against natural excess.

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