Toward Social Justice
One of the greatest revelations of the year for me was seeing Bill Fletcher Jr. speak at New York’s Left Forum this past March. For years I’ve been familiar with Fletcher, who is, perhaps, the most prominent left intellectual in the U.S. labor movement, who was a special assistant to John Sweeney in the early years of this administration and still a trusted figure in the mainstream labor movement despite his socialist barnstorming. But this was the first time I had heard him speak. I was so captivated by the way he could crystalize and articulate the challenges we face and the practical and realistic steps we could take to address them that I attended every panel at which he spoke, which I hadn’t intended when I got there. Fletcher has just published his first book, “Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path Toward Social Justice,” […]