Solidarity for Sale

A fascinating, definitive history and analysis of American labour union corruption - and an urgent call for social justice - that reads at times like a thriller American labour unions have been, it runs out, shot through with corruption from their very inception. They never really had a Golden Age. From "Big Jim" Colosimo, the patron saint of Chicago's Mafia, to Brooklyn's Sammy "The Bull" Gravano a century later, organized crime has controlled huge swathes of the mainline labour movement. It still does. Impassioned, revelatory, prodigiously researched and reported and thoroughly convincing, Solidarity for Sale shows how the American labour movement's decent ends are continually undermined by its tawdry means - a diet of daily corruption longer than the menu at a Long Island diner. By telling the untold histories, uncovering the covered-up scandals and even recommending a way forward, Robert Fitch builds a devastating indictment and goes beyond it to show that union corruption, stagnation, and decline are not America's national destiny. Labour could regain its needed place in American life. But it would require a set of reforms deeper than anything now being proposed; nothing less than a revolutionary overthrow of its culture of corruption and its replacement by a civic culture of accountability and consent.