Michael D. Yates is associate editor of Monthly Review. He was for many years professor of economics at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown. He is the author of Longer Hours, Fewer jobs: Employment and Unemployment in the United States (1994), Why Unions Matter (1998), and Naming the System: Inequality and Work in the Global System (2004), all published by Monthly Review Press.

In January 2004, the U.S. labor market looked like this: Out of a civilian labor force of 146,863,000 persons, 8,297,000 were officially unemployed, meaning that they were not working but had actively sought work in the past four weeks. This gave us an official unemployment rate of 5.6 percent, down very slightly from the 5.7 percent posted in December 2003. This unemployment rate masked considerable disparities in unemployment rates by race and ethnicity. The black unemployment rate for January 2004 was 10.5 percent, and the Hispanic rate was 7.3 percent. The national average also hid differences among the states. In some parts of the country, unemployment rates were significantly higher than the national average. In the Pacific Northwest, where I have been living for the past year, signs of economic distress are easy to see. Not only have the unemployment rates of Oregon and Washington been significantly higher than the national average - 7.3 percent in Oregon in December 2003; 6.8 percent in Washington - both rates were only slightly lower than they had been one year before. Homelessness of both young and old abounds.

The official unemployment rate does not tell us how much unused labor there is in the economy, that is, how large is the reserve army of labor. Excluded from the official count of unemployed are a number of groups. People working part-time but who would prefer full-time work (now defined as 35 hours per week) are called "involuntary part-time workers." In January there were 4,714,000 such persons. People who stop looking for work but who want a job and have searched for work in the past year are described as persons "marginally attached to the labor market." In January there were 1,700,000 of these, of whom 432,000 were "discouraged workers," those who stopped looking for work for a "market-related" reason such as a lack of available jobs in their occupation. If we add the involuntary part-time workers and the marginally attached to the officially unemployed, we get 14,714,000 persons for January and an expanded unemployment rate of 9.9 percent, perhaps a truer measure of labor market employment distress.(1)

However, even the expanded unemployment rate does not include all of the labor surplus. In an economy experiencing slack labor markets for several years, some workers will just drop out of the labor force and not be counted even as marginally attached. For example, some may take a forced early retirement and live as best they can on a reduced income. T here is evidence that workers whose bodies have begun to break down from a lifetime of strenuous work are increasingly seeking and getting social security disability benefits. As corporate downsizing, relocation, and outsourcing eliminate their jobs, these workers start to see disability as the only way for them to make an income. Since 1990, the number of persons on social security disability has risen by nearly 100 percent, to nearly 6 million. Between January 2001 and September of 2002, the disability rolls grew by almost 400,000.(2)

Some persons unable to find work end up in prison. Many unemployed persons today have been looking for work for a long time. In January 2004, the share of the officially unemployed who had been searching for work for at least 15 weeks was 40.2 percent, and this share has been rising for some time. In January 2003, it was 35.3 percent. For those unemployed 27 weeks or longer, the percentage for January 2004 was 22.7; a year earlier it had been 19.5 percent. The average (mean) duration of unemployment is now 19.8 weeks, up two weeks from one year ago.(1) Long spells of unemployment sometimes lead people to commit crimes or be in situations where it is more likely that they will be accused of crimes. This, in turn, will put some of them in prison. The United States leads the world in number of persons incarcerated in prisons and jails, more than 2 million, of whom about half are black. Suppose that just one-half of the black persons in prisons and jails are disguised unemployed, that is, about 500,000 people. If we added these persons to the number of black unemployed in January 2004 (and by definition, to the black labor force), the black unemployment rate would rise from 10.5 to 13.1 percent, an increase of more than 20 percent. In connection with these astounding numbers, it is well to remember that many prisoners are working behind bars, engaged in what can only be called forced labor. As one prison activist put it,

For private business, prison labor is like a pot of gold. No strikes. No union organizing. No unemployment insurance or workers' compensation to pay. No language problem, as in a foreign country. New leviathan prisons are being built with thousands of eerie acres of factories inside the walls. Prisoners do data entry for Chevron, make telephone reservations for TWA, raise hogs, shovel manure, make circuit boards, limousines, waterbeds. and lingerie for Victoria's Secret, all at a fraction of the cost of free labor.(4)

The considerable labor surplus just described must be put in historical context to draw out its full meaning. This surplus exists 27 months into an economic recovery! As many economists have noted, we are in a jobless recovery; in fact, the current employment situation is without precedent. Stephen Roach, chief economist at Morgan an Stanley, put it this way:

The modern-day U.S. economy has never seen anything like this. Fully 25 months into this so-called economic recovery, private sector jobs are still about 1 percent below levels prevailing at the official trough of the last recession in November 2001; at this juncture in the typical recovery, jobs are normally up about 6 percent. Had Corporate America held to the hiring trajectory of the typical cycle, fully 7.7 million more American workers would be employed today. Moreover, the current hiring shortfall far outstrips that which was evident in America's only other jobless recovery - the upturn following the recession of 1990-91. In that instance, it took about 12 months for the job machine to kick back into gear. By our calculations, the current job profile in the private economy is now 2.4 million workers below, the trajectory of the jobless recovery a decade ago.(5)

There is some controversy about the changes in employment referred to by Roach, The federal government's Bureau of Labor Statistics conducts two monthly surveys from which employment information can he gathered, Roach and most economists use the Payroll Survey of about 400,000 business establishments, with an average coverage of 40 million employees, This survey indicates an employment loss of 726,000 jobs between the end of the last recession (November 2001) and November 2003. It also shows a job loss since the beginning of the last recession (March 2001) of 2.4 million jobs.

The other monthly survey is the Household Survey of about 60,000 households. The Household Survey, which is used primarily to calculate the monthly unemployment rate (this cannot be calculated from the Payroll Survey, for obvious reasons), shows an increase in employment of almost 650,000 from March 2001 to November 2003. However, there are serious problems with using the Household Survey as an estimate of job growth. Some of the growth in employment was due simply to new population estimates derived from the 2000 census and succeeding estimates of population growth, A population adjustment was made in January 2003, and this adjustment increased employment by 576,000 persons. To make the Household Survey employment estimates since January 2003 comparable with those taken before this date, it would be necessary to upwardly adjust the earlier numbers, This would show, much less employment growth, In addition, the Household Survey counts as employed persons who are self-employed, are working without pay in a family business, and who are on unpaid leaves of absence. There is some evidence that there has been a significant rise in self-employment since the onset of the last recession. What this probably means is that some people who can't find jobs simply declare themselves to be entrepreneurs, something they would not have done had regular jobs been available. For example, one of my cousins lost a job as a coal miner because his mine shut down. To earn some money he has been washing cars in his home garage. He is a lost job in the Payroll Survey, but he is employed in the Household Survey.

If the two surveys are reconciled for their differences, they show employment numbers which are fairly close together, giving credence to the phrase jobless recovery." So anemic has recent job growth been that President George W. Bush is poised to be the first president since Herbert Hoover to end a term in office with less national employment than when his term began.(6)

These many months of labor market slack are reflected in the wage data, At the aggregate level, Roach notes,

There can be no mistaking the important implications of this jobless recovery. Lacking in job creation as never before, it follows that there is an equally profound shortfall of wage income generation. Normally, at this juncture in a U.S. business cycle expansion, private wage and salary disbursements - fully 45% of total personal income and easily the largest component of household purchasing power - are up by 8% (in real terms). Yet 24 months into the current expansion, this key slice of income is actually down nearly I% - the functional equivalent of about a $35o billion shortfall in real consumer purchasing power.(7)

Wage growth has slowed down markedly. In the expansion year of 2003, median weekly wages fell a bit in real terms (i.e. in terms of purchasing power), the first time this happened since 1996. In general, wages have been stagnant, adding evidence to the argument that labor markets are slack even though the economy has been growing for more than two years.

It is not as if slow wage growth is taking place in a high-wage economy or in one in which the majority of workers have meaningful and steady jobs, In 2001, at the end of a ten-year economic expansion, 23.9 percent of all employment paid a wage inadequate to support a family of four above the poverty level even with full-time, year-round employment - a wage rate of $8.70 an hour. For blacks this figure was 31.2 percent, and for Hispanics it was 40.4 percent, Only long hours of work allow many families to meet even minimum needs. The United States now leads the rich nations in average yearly hours of work.(8) In 1979, the average Japanese worker toiled for 281 more hours than did a U.S. worker, but by 2000, the average U.S. worker forged ahead, While Japanese workers cut 286 hours from their work year, U.S. workers added 32 hours to theirs, In all too many cases, long hours are made possible by virtue of the fact that workers work long hours of overtime or hold more than one part-time job.

The notion that the United States is a nation with a surfeit of good jobs does not hold up under close scrutiny. Tens of millions of workers labor at low-paying jobs that do not utilize anywhere near their potential capacities, Nearly 30 million persons labor as teaching assistants, food preparers and servers, counter attendants, cashiers, counter and rental clerks, bookkeepers, customer service reps, stock clerks and order fillers, secretaries, general office clerks, assemblers, sorters, helpers, truck drivers, packers and packagers, and laborers. The Bureau of Lahor Statistics estimates that the ten occupations with the largest job growth between 2000 and 2010 will be food preparation and service workers, customer service representatives, registered nurses, retail salespersons, computer support specialists, cashiers, general office clerks, security guards, computer software engineers, and waiters and waitresses, Of these, nurses and software engineers are the only obviously "good" jobs, and even these are rapidly being rationalized by cost-conscious managers. And it is hard to think of jobs in which workers do not feel a sense of insecurity, fearful that they may be next on the corporate chopping block." This insecurity makes it easier for employers to raise the rate of exploitation. In Portland, Oregon, 1 know of many workers who hold more than one part-time job to make ends meet and are so fearful of being displaced that they work off the clock rather than risk their boss accusing them of "milking the time clock."

It is not my purpose here to delve into the causes of the "jobless recovery." Roach points to the outsourcing of jobs to low-wage venues, including skilled work once thought immune to this, made possible by the revolution in information technology, as a prime culprit. No doubt there is truth in this. The United States has been hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs for a long time, 42 consecutive months in fact. Some of these jobs have moved abroad, although some of them have been lost as a consequence of labor-saving technology and work reorganization. Information technology employment has actually fallen a bit in the current economic recovery in the United States, while it has skyrocketed in India. On the other hand, however, manufacturing employment has fallen worldwide over an extended period of time, a sign perhaps of the excess capacity that plagues global capitalism and is a direct consequence of the capital spending binge of the recent economic bubble. More automobiles, steel, computers, and fiber optic cable can be produced than consumed. The consequences of this overcapacity are plant closings, downsizings, and layoffs.

Capitalist economies always experience cyclical ups and downs, and they are always susceptible to structural changes, such as technological revolutions. These, in turn, have multiple impacts on the working class. However, the strength of these impacts is critically dependent on how well workers are collectively organized, both in their workplaces and politically. It is one thing to lose a job as a steelworker in a nonunion plant; it is another to lose one in a unionized workplace. It is one thing to have your job outsourced when you were working in the United States; it is another to have it sent out of the country when you were employed in Germany. There is a great difference between being poor in the United States and being poor in Sweden. These differences are due to the different levels of organization of these countries' working classes.

There are various ways to measure the strength of a nation's working class. What is the union density, that is, the fraction of nonsupervisory employment belonging to unions? This is not a perfect measure, because there are countries, such a France, that have low densities but reasonably cohesive working classes capable of successfully confronting both employers and govemment. But in general, workers are better off, both in terms of wages and benefits and social provision, in places where union density is high. What is the incidence of strikes? Strikes are workers' primary weapon in the class struggle. Where they are very rare, we can legitimately suspect that the labor movement is weak. Finally, is there a strong labor political party? Where there are parties rooted solidly in the working class and where these parties are significant national actors, we would expect workers to have more worker-friendly laws as well as more and better social welfare programs.

By the standards of these three questions, the labor movement of the United States is in a bad way. In 2003, union density in the United States was 12,9 percent; it has fallen steadily since 1983 when density was 20.1 percent. Total union membership was 15.8 million, down 369,000 from 2002 and less than it was in 1995 when John Sweeney and his "New Voice" reform slate took power in the AFL-CIO and promised to organize millions of new members. Union density in the private sector of the economy is a stunningly low 8.2 percent, down by half since 1983, Only the 37.2 percent density in the public sector, which has held fairly steady since 1983, has kept the membership figures from showing catastrophic declines, About 17 percent of all public sector union members are in the federal government, and these are under strong attack from the Bush administration, which is both pushing for the privatization of many federal services and denying bargaining rights to federal unions under the cover of national security. State and local government workers are also threatened by both privatization and the fiscal crises of most of the states. So it might not be long before the public sector density and membership numbers start to decline as well, In any event, apart from France, the United States has the lowest union density of any rich capitalist country. It is interesting to note that half of all union members in the United States live in just six states: California, New York, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, states which account for only one-third of all wage and salary workers.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics keeps records of work stoppages involving 1,000 or more workers. Both the number of such strikes and the number of workers involved are at historic lows. In 2002, there were nineteen such work stoppages; by comparison there were 470 in 1952 and 187 in 1980, In 2002, these work stoppages involved 45,900 workers; in 1952, the number was 2,746,000, and in 1980 it was 795,000. Strikes, especially those involving large numbers of workers, are becoming increasingly rare in the United States, a fact that, combined with the low density numbers, is indicative of the weakness of the labor movement.

Not much needs to be said about labor's political clout. It is extremely limited. There is no labor party or real labor political presence in the United States. Every four years, the AFL-CIO and the member unions pump tens of millions of dollars into the campaign of the Democratic Party candidate for president. Yet, the returns on these investment: have been minimal. There have been successes at the local level, and labor's efforts there have at least got some politicians talking about labor issues. But labor leaders do not even seem to have enough power nationally to force the candidates whose coffers they fill to give them some air time to champion labor causes. And the politicians labor supports often seen ignorant of the most basic labor issues and neither committed nor powerful enough to pass legislation beneficial to workers. On the "Chris Matthews Show," Congressman Dick Gephardt, a politician strongly supported by organized labor, did not appear to know what a right-to-work law was. And compared to the other rich capitalist economies, the United States has far and away the most porous social safety net.

To see how important the weakness of the U.S. labor movement is in terms of the well-being of workers, it is necessary to show what unions mean to them. Lawrence Mishel and Matthew Wallets of the Economic Policy Institute recently surveyed the literature in a paper titled "How Unions Help All Workers." Here are their conclusions:

• Unions raise wages of unionized workers by roughly 20 percent and raise compensation, including both wages and benefits, by about 28 percent.
• Unions reduce wage inequality because they raise wages more for low- and middle-wage earners than for higher-wage workers, more for blue-collar than for white-collar workers, and more for workers who do not have a college degree.
• Strong unions set a pay standard that nonunion employees follow. For example, a high school graduate whose workplace is not unionized but whose industry is 25 percent unionized is paid 5 percent more than similar workers in less unionized industries.
• The impact of unions on total nonunion wages is almost as large as the impact on total union wages.
• The most sweeping advantage for unionized workers is in fringe benefits. Unionized workers are more likely than their nonunionized counterparts to receive paid leave, are approximately 18 percent to 28 percent more likely to have employer-provided health insurance, and are 32 percent to 54 percent more likely to be in employer-provided pension plans,
• Unionized workers receive more generous health benefits than nonunionized workers. They also pay 18 percent lower health care deductibles and a smaller share of the costs for family coverage. In retirement, unionized workers are 24 percent more likely to be covered by health insurance paid for by their employer.
• Unionized workers receive better pension plans. Not only are they more likely to have a guaranteed benefit in retirement, their employers contribute 28 percent more toward pensions.
• Unionized workers receive 26 percent more vacation time and 14 percent more total paid leave (vacations and holidays).
• Unions play a pivotal role both in securing legislated labor protections and rights such as safety and health, overtime, and family/medical leave and in enforcing those rights on the job. Because unionized workers are more informed, they are more likely to benefit from social insurance programs such as unemployment insurance and workers compensation. Unions are thus an intermediary institution that provide a necessary complement to legislated benefits and protections.(11)

It appears then that the best way for workers to both improve their quality of life and protect themselves against the many insecurities endemic to capitalist economies is to join unions.

Despite the anti-union bias of employers and much of the media, workers seem to have a good understanding of this. According to recent Gallup polling, 65 percent of people in the United States approve of unions; a strong majority believe that unions do more good than harm; and millions of workers say that they would join a union if they could (12)

We have a situation in which workers are having grave difficulties finding jobs, especially good jobs, and those who are employed are faced with the real possibility that they will become redundant. At the same time, large-scale unionization of the workforce would provide a tried and tested way to not only improve the circumstances of union members but to create a climate in which the effects of dowvnsizing, outsourcing, technological change, sickness, workplace injuries, and old age would be much more worker friendly, A high proportion of the working class appears to grasp this. Yet union density and union membership are falling, and unions have seen their political leverage slip away. What is going on?

I have been over this ground before in the pages of this magazine, so I will not repeat it in detail.(13) But two points need to be made. First, it is not as if the AFL-CIO and its member unions do not know how to organize workers. In his recent book, "The Next Upsurge: Labor and the New Social Movements," Dan Clawson provides ample evidence through case studies and interviews that workers of all kinds can be organized despite all the barriers so often noted, such as ineffective and employer friendly labor laws.(14) Clawson shows that unions are successful where they do some or all of the following:

• empower the rank-and-file in show and deliberate organizing cam paigns that develop the workers' capacities and are aimed at forming democratic unions, and continue to do these things even if the unions suffer initial defeats.
• envision the labor movement as something larger than labor union and struggle for community goals such as low-cost housing, while a the same time building workplace power through conununit alliances.
• support, ally with, and give monetary assistance to labor friendly and non-traditional labor groups, such as the global justice and anti-sweatshop movements, worker centers such as the Chinese Staff and Workers' Association, and Jobs with Justice.
• face issues of gender, race and ethnicity head-on and make such issues central to organizing.

It is interesting to note that the strategies and tactics described and analyzed by Clawson are very much like those used by the labor movement in the 1930s, which were fundamental to building the left-led CIO unions. They were also critical to the successes of a remarkable group of what Vanessa Tait calls "poor people's unions" that came to life from the 1960s onward, the period in which the AFL-CIO and most of its member unions had abandoned even the pretense of building a labor movement.(15) What successes labor unions have had in recent years are the result of doing the things done by groups such as the National Welfare Rights Organization, ACORN'S United Labor Unions, the Revolutionary Union Movement, workfare unions, and workers' centers.

Clawson believes that the growing union embrace of movement building, combined with the growth of the global justice and other movements, puts labor in a position for a new "upsurge" of rapid growth similar to that of the CIO in the 1930s. Clawson may be right, but he may also be engaging in wishful thinking. Which brings me to my second point. What Clawson and most commentators on the labor movement nearly always fail to discuss is the left. In the 1930s there was a vibrant left-wing politics in the United States and many left-wing organizations The left already had a long history in the United States at the beginning of the Great Depression, and the various strands of the left, including the Communist Party, were critical to labor's upsurge. Not only did leftists build the new unions, pioneering the tactics praised by Clawson. but they also were committed to building a radically different society. their ideological commitment sustained them in hard tines, and more importantly, helped them to impart to workers a class way of looking at things and a feeling that they were part of something larger than themselves.

Today, there is nothing like this within organized labor or, for that matter, in most other progressive movements. Sweeney's "New Voice" was a revolution from above, and, like all such "revolutions," envisioned change as limited and moving from the top down, As such, this revolution has clearly failed. One sign of its failure is the appearance of a new group, mainly situated within the AFL-CIO called the New Union Partnership (NUP), led by the leaders of five large unions: the Service Employees International Union, the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, the Laborers International Union of North America, and the Carpenters Union (which is not now in the AFL-CIO). The NUP argues that union density must be increased if labor is to regain its power, and its leaders argue that a structural reorganization of unions, involving the consolidation and elimination of many unions, the strategic division of union jurisdictions among the few remaining unions, the elimination of local control over central labor councils, and the devotion of nearly all union resources to organizing and politics is pivotal to union success. 1 cannot go into the details of the NUP plan here, but at this point it is not clear that it is suffused with the vision embraced by Clawson and Tait.(16)

The years since the "New Voice" give witness to the fact that, despite many improvements made in the house of labor and the spaces opened up for labor progressives, progressives have little reason to hope for more than they have already achieved. Labor's top leaders are not going to start talking about class; they are not going to form a labor party, they are not going to champion union democracy; they are not going to lead the global justice movement; they are not even going to confront their overt redbaiting and pro-imperialist past (they have been asked to do so but so far have refused).(17)

What is critically needed is a labor left.(18) I am convinced that there is a base for a left within the labor and allied movements. There are many potential radicals in every labor union, up to and including local leadership and national union staff, What these folks need is to hear a left-wing analysis of capitalist society. I can attest from 25 years as a labor educator that when they hear it, many of them take to it like fish to water. If am correct, workers will have a much better chance to find jobs and unions members if the labor movement shifts sharply to the left, embracing class analysis as its ideology and class struggle as its strategy. But for this to happen, the left must become as active as it can in every union every organizing drive, every effort at labor education, every politico campaign, every movement for social justice. Labor education is especially important, as the recent right-wing attack on college labor studies programs makes clear. There is nothing employers fear more than a radically educated working class.(19)

Notes

1. All of the data in the first two paragraphs are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics http://www.bls.gov
2. Louis Uchitelle, "Laid-Off Workers Swelling the Cost of Disability Pay," The New York Times, September 2, 2002.
3. See http://www.bls.gov
4. Eve Goldberg and Linda Evans, The Prison Industrial Compkx and the Global Economy (Berkeley. Prison Activist Resource Center, no date), http://www.prisonactivist.org/crisis/evans-goldberg.html
5. Stephen Roach, "False Recovery," January 12, 2004, http://www.morganstanley.com/GEFdata/digests/20040112-mon.html
6. For a good summary of the two employment reports, see Elise Gould, "Measuring Employment Since the Recovery: A Comparison of the Household and Payroll Surveys," Economic Policy Institute Briefing Paper #148, December 12, 2003, http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/briefingpapers_bp148
7. Roach, "False Recovery:"
8. Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and Heather Boushey, The State of Working America 2002/2003 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003),134-B9,421
9. See Michael D. Yates, Naming the System: Inequality and Work in The Global Economy (New York Monthly Review press, 2003),100-103.
10. Data on union density and strike incidence are also available at the BLS (http://www.bls.gov) website.
11. Lawrence Mishel and Matthew Walters, "How Unions Help An Workers," Economic Policy Institute, Economic Policy Institute Briefing Paper #143, August 2003, http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/briefingpapers_bp143
12. Lydia Saad, "Labor Unions Broadly Supported,
    http://www.gallup.com/content/default.asp?ci=9148&pg=1
13. See, for example, Michael D. Yates and and Fernando Gapasin, "Organizing the Unorganized: Will Promises Become Practices," in Ellen Meiksins Wood, Pete Meiksins, and Michael Yates; editors, Rising From the Ashes. Labor in the Age of Global Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999). This is an updated and revised version of an essay of the same title published in the July/August 1999 issue of Monthly Review.
14. Dan Clawson, The Next Upsurge: Labor and the New Social Movements (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003).
15. See Vanessa Tait, Poor Workers' Unions: Rebuilding the Labor Movement from Below (Boston: South End Press, forthcoming).
16. For details on the NUP, see William Johnson am: Chris Kutalik, . "New Unity Partnership: Five Union Presidents Launch Bid to `Revolutionize' AFL-CIO," Labor Notes, http://www.labornotes.org/archives/2003/10/a.html; JoAnn Wypijewski, "The New Unity Partnership: A Manifest Destiny for Labor," Counterpunch, October 6, 2003, http://www.counterpunch.org/jw10062003.html, and the rebuttal by Tom Woodruff (along with Wypijewski's response) in Counterpunch, November 4, 2003, http://www.counterpunch.org/woodruff11042003.html
17. See Kim Scipes, "AFL-CIO Refuses to Clear the Air on Foreign Policy Operations," Labor Notes, February 2004.
18. See the speech given by Bill Fletcher Jr. at the 2003 Labor Notes conference, http://www.labornotes.org/conferences/speeches.html#fletcher
19. See David Bacon, "Class Warfare," The Nation, January 12, 2004, http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040112&s=bacon It is very unfortunate to note that organized labor itself is not alwavs keen on labor education, especially when the educator is critical of labor's leaders. Eighty-nine year old labor educator Harry Kelber, a long-time critic of AFL-CIO and member union leaders, was recently expelled from his local union on suspect charges of missing a couple of months of dues payments.

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