At Home in Union-Made Utopia: PBS Looks at the Housing Co-Op Movement
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Three elderly New Yorkers—Yok Ziebel, Julie Luguvoy and Pete Rosenblum—are meeting at the apartment complex in the Bronx where they grew up together. They embrace with all of the affection of lifelong friends. They joke with each other (Ziebel: “Did you lose weight?” Rosenblum: “No, I’m shrinking.” Ziebel: “We’re all shrinking.”). They reminisce.
This sweet moment begins a splendid, subtle documentary, “At Home in Utopia,” created by Michal Goldman and Ellen Brodsky, which will be shown on the PBS “Independent Lens” series April 28. (Check your local PBS station schedule here.)
Ziebel, Luguvoy and Rosenblum grew up in one of the most remarkable and least-known experiments in the history of the union movement—the housing cooperatives of New York City, built mainly by immigrant Jewish workers in the early 20th century.
These workers agreed on very little. They were socialists, liberals, labor Zionists, communists, anarchists and everything in between. They engaged in some ferocious political fights in their day.
Yet they all had something powerful in common. They thought unions should aim for “a shenere un besere velt”—a more beautiful and better world, as the Yiddish socialist Workmen’s Circle put it—even if they passionately disagreed about what that world would look like.
How to get from here to there? That’s where the housing cooperatives (and other kinds of cooperatives) came in.
Work Songs, Bargaining for Work and Family and More from Cool Tools
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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.
USW President Gerard Sets the Record Right on Employee Free Choice Act
It’s awfully hard to find accurate and fair descriptions of unions, their leaders and issues in the mainstream media. Clichés and stereotypes that just won’t die far too often substitute for fair reporting or analysis.
That’s why yesterday’s in-depth profile of United Steelworkers (USW) President Leo Gerard in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was so refreshing. In addition, Gerard’s appearance Friday on “Bill Moyers Journal” on PBS was a great rebuttal to the many ill-informed, slanted or just down-right lies about the Employee Free Choice Act filling the airwaves and news columns.
Post-Gazette reporter Ann Belser explores Gerard’s deep commitment to working hard for working families and the union on issues such as universal health care and getting the economy back on track.
Click here to read the profile.
