JOHN BRUMMETT Advertisement

Card check may be dead. It probably is, actually.

I'm glad. To have unions formed unilaterally by mere signatures always struck me as overcompensation for the many and severe slights sustained in recent decades by the working man.

But significant change in union laws to strengthen the hand of workers wanting to organize is not dead, and should not be.

The prospect lives because of the story Stewart Acuff tells. It lives because of the vital patience one learns, and indeed masters, through grassroots organizing.

Acuff is the national AFL-CIO's chief organizer and an old Southern boy, now 53. He grew up in a 90-mile orbit of Memphis as son of an oft-moving Southern Baptist minister and a school teacher.

He spent his formative years coming to understand that his culture was wholly wrong on race, and, it logically followed, other things as well.

First he was an ACORN community organizer. Since 2001, he's been labor's main field man, scouring the country pursuing this very issue -- "card check" or its incremental descendant -- as the great work of his life and the most important thing to happen for the American working man, he says, since Taft-Hartley.

Here's the story he tells:

The middle class has been destroyed in this country. Working people have had their buying power systematically eroded against increases in prevailing costs of health care and college education and real estate. All the while, corporate honchos have made out like the bandits we now know so many of them literally to have been.

Somehow, though, working men and women have been made to think it's all their own fault, that they took too much and weren't smart enough to adapt to the world that changed beneath them.

But it wasn't their fault. They got up early every morning and fed and dressed their children and got them to school. Then they trudged to the office or the plant or the work site and did the jobs they were assigned to do.

It was the big shots who prevailed on pliable politicians to cut taxes to benefit inordinately the rich and widen our class gap into a class canyon. It was the big shots who prevailed on the politicians to let the rich get richer in a wholly unregulated funny-money market.

The systematic erosion of workers' security, pride and value -- how has that worked for us?

We're pretty much bankrupt. Now the big shots are telling the pliable politicians that the last thing we need is to make life harder for employers.

But the fact is that America will not come back economically unless American workers get some restoration of security and buying power. So let's call and write Senators Lincoln and Pryor and Specter and the rest. Let's tell them it's time to try a little trickle-up, demand-side economic reform, for two precious reasons -- one to help working people and the other to preserve our very way of life.

It's a good and powerful story. It may not be all true, but it could not possibly be as false as the wild yarns that have been spun for the last three decades to land us in our horrid condition.

Acuff was back visiting in the state this week, for the second time in a couple of months.

Chatting up a local political columnist in a state with two swing senatorial votes on the hope that someday the columnist might write something even mildly sensitive on labor issues, and that this might have some residual influence on those senators or their constituencies -- that's what grassroots political organizing is, in part.

You plant seeds. You nurture. You wait. Someday, maybe, from seeds planted from Alaska to Arkansas, you reap tasty fruit.

Labor might yet get shorter election periods, binding arbitration, stiffer penalties for improper employer pressure and stronger oversight.

When the chamber of commerce guy tells you there's no compromise being shopped on "card check," you should keep something in mind.

He is right that there's no compromise being worked on, at least with him. That's because the union folks are out there telling a compelling story, planting seeds widely, generating calls and letters, working directly with elected politicians and, above all else, trusting the residual value of all this patience and plodding.

John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.