Bring Out Yer Dead

Abstract

This article reviews three recent books about challenges facing contemporary labor movements. Clawson’s argument that U.S. labor unions ought to seek a fusion with 1960s social movements to build a broad challenge to neoliberal politics reflects the seriousness of labor’s crisis in the United States; his argument is an important one but does not adequately explore the obstacles and difficulties involved in such a fusion. The contributors to Michael Gold’s volume are much more optimistic aboutlabor’s future in Europe, but the contributionof neoliberal restructuringto widening cracks in Europe’s social pacts and a gradual weakening of labor’s position there are evident. Contributors to Cornfield and McCammon’s volume raise doubts about European labor movements’long-term ability to resist neoliberal pressures and demonstrate how in the global South neoliberalism has paralyzed some countries’ labor movements and sparked grassroots resistance in others.