Observing the proliferation of local coalitions among labor and other groups, in 1992 Tim Costello and I edited a collection called Building Bridges: The Emerging Grassroots Coalition of Labor and Community. The contributors described the growing role of community-labor alliances in strikes and other labor struggles; the emergence of community coalitions challenging de-industrialization and promoting alternative forms of economic development; new electoral coalitions; and labor-community issue campaigns ranging from economic conversion from military to peacetime production to the campaign to block the confirmation of Ronald Reagan’s prized conservative judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. The book also included programmatic alternatives ranging from employee ownership to statewide economic development strategies to military conversion.
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