More Thoughts on the Worker-Student Alliance: A Response to Steve Early
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[Excerpt] My comments here reflect ten degrees of difference. While I mostly agree with him, I think Early takes a valid critique a step too far with jibes about red carpet treatment, Mormon missionaries, the best and the brightest, mobile organizers, self- sacrificing souls, and the like, suggesting that any reliance on graduates is a mistake, and only indigenous staffers should build the labor movement. His only exception, it appears, is for graduates going into workplaces where Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU)–style dissident groups take on their national union leadership, replicating the “colonizing” of the late 1960s worker-student alliance. As Early says, students’ entry into trade union work then was mostly “in opposition to the labor establishment of that era.” I take him to argue that students now aspiring to trade union work should follow the same dissident path rather than seek union staff positions.