Since this is my final post and I've been addressed as Thomas Frank, one thing I should clarify is that Thomas Frank ("What's the Matter With Kansas?") is a Goliath, whereas I, T.A. Frank ("What's the Matter With My Rent Check?"), am rather more a David. I don't intend to take five smooth stones and fire them at Thomas Frank's head, but I wouldn't mind shifting the balance of power my way by peaceful means.

At any rate, Marshall Ganz has responded with interesting posts in the comment section of our entries, so be sure to check them out. Let me focus on one of them. Ganz notes that the tightening of a labor markets in the 1960s represented "the creation of opportunity as a result of one's resources suddenly becoming more valuable." But, he notes, important organizing also happened in the early 1930s, when labor markets were anything but tight. Given that we face similar circumstances today, we may need to think along similar lines.

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I'd like briefly to address some points made by Kim Bobo and Janice Fine about immigration and labor organizing. Without question, stagnant wages and increased workplace abuses are due to many things, and it's debatable how much of a role illegal immigration has played. But to say something isn't "the" cause doesn't mean it's not "a" cause.

Kim Bobo says the main trouble comes from Goliath employers who feel free to "underpay workers because they know how hard it is for workers to find other jobs." But how is that not consistent with oversupply? Janice Fine says that the "American state cannot stop immigration of low wage workers seeking better lives: workers will get in and flows will vary with market conditions." But, surely, we're not market absolutists. Why should supply and demand be forces we're able to tame when it comes to wages and working conditions but unable to tame when it comes to inflows of labor?

Janice Fine asks the question "who is Goliath" in response to Thomas Frank suggesting that immigrant workers collectively are a Goliath in the workplace.

Goliath is clearly employers like Wal Mart. Goliath represents power - arrogant power. If you read the Biblical text, Goliath taunted the Israelites and then taunted David when he stood before him with a slingshot. We see that kind of arrogance among employers right now. "If you don't like this job and how I pay you, go find another."

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Cesar Chavez is undeniably the most revered union leader of the past four decades. Okay, you might say he hasn't had much competition on that front. As someone who has long written about labor matters, I have often wondered what catapulted Chavez to that exalted perch - the most respected labor leader since the great Walter Reuther..

In his very smart book, Why David Sometimes Wins, Marshall Ganz goes far to explain Chavez's extraordinary rise and success. Ganz, picking up the baton left by Saul Alinsky, has written a primer that explains how underdogs like Chavez can emerge victorious.

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Of the many important lessons in his work, Marshall Ganz reminds us that the essence of strategic capacity is information, social knowledge and getting the target right.

So here's my question for Thomas Frank:

Forty-three million low wage workers in the United States and 25% of the workforce at poverty level: how do we diagnose the problem of exploitative work?

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T.A. Frank should become aware of the ongoing David vs. Goliath story of UNITE HERE, whose hotel and gaming workers includes many immigrants and has much demographic similarities to the UFW in its heyday. UNITE HERE has won card check neutrality agreements and unionization against powerful international hotel and gaming conglomerates, and has brought the wages of unionized hotel workers to nearly double that of non-union hotel workers in the same city.

UNITE HERE uses many of the same strategies and tactics that brought the UFW success, particularly the consumer boycott. In fact, UNITE HERE's Hotel Workers Rising campaign used videos of the UFW grape boycott to train staff and community supporters on running hotel boycotts; the success of the latter pressured hotels to both agree to card check neutrality and greatly increase wages and benefits for UNITE HERE members.

UNITE HERE is the union most impacted by UFW alums, and I think Cesar Chavez would be quite impressed by its accomplishments.

Marshall Ganz's new book about the lessons of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers is superb, and I only wish this discussion group had even more time to examine all of the points it makes--one of which is that David, after having defeated Goliath, can easily fall prey to the same delusions and hubris that weakened Goliath. (Chavez started as a David but undid many of his achievements once the UFW became a minor Goliath.) For example, now that the Obama campaign, which started as a David, has become a Goliath in the form of an Obama White House, how does it retain the qualities of David that made it thrive in the first place?

But I can't ask everything, so instead I'd like to focus on the topic of labor supply, since unions today are weak and income gaps in the United States are as wide as they've been in many decades. Ganz makes it clear that tight labor markets in the country were integral to the success of Cesar Chavez in organizing the United Farm Workers (or its precursors) in the 1960s and 70s. This isn't to say that tight labor markets guaranteed the success of the UFW--strategic mastery was essential to capitalizing on the opportunity--but they set the stage.

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Why can the powerless sometimes challenge the powerful successfully? Why can resourcefulness sometimes compensate for lack of resources? Why can "David" sometimes defeat "Goliath"? In this book I respond to these questions, questions to which I've devoted a lifetime of practice, study, and teaching.

Based on an analysis of the struggle of California farm workers to organize a union - a struggle undertaken at four moments since 1900: prior to World War I, during the 1930s, in the late 1940s, and, finally in the 1960s. Each time immigrant associations, radical organizers, and the AFL tried, but until the 1960s, each effort failed when the growers used mobilization for war to suppress the organizing and import new workers. In the early 1960s, three groups took advantage of the end of the Bracero Program to try once again: the AFL-CIO, in 1959, the Teamsters, in 1961, and an independent farm worker association, later to become the United Farm Workers, led by Cesar Chavez, in 1962. But in 1966, when a breakthrough was achieved, victory belonged to neither established, well-financed, and well-connected union, but, rather, to the fledgling farm workers' association.

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