On the last day of February, striking and locked-out grocery workers in Southern California ended their stand against Safeway-owned Vons/Pavillions, Albertsons, and Kroger-owned Ralphs chains.

It’s been a few months now since we heard anything from the New Unity Partnership (NUP), the coalition first described here in October 2003. This coalition-composed of the presidents of the Service Employees (SEIU), Hotel and Restaurant Employees (HERE), Garment and Textile Workers (UNITE), Carpenters, and Laborers unions-planned to strengthen the U.S. labor movement by increasing union density sector by sector.

In the wake of the settlement of the grocery strike/lockout, the media have given us scores of sober assessments and “Monday morning quarterbacking” about the extent of the defeat and the UFCW’s piecemeal strategic approach.

The criticisms that rank-and-file grocery and warehouse workers, strike supporters, and others have voiced point to possible alternative strategic paths the UFCW could have chosen. Despite more than adequate lead time, union officials seemed to have had too narrow a view of what a contract campaign and strike should be.

When Kim Moody called me a "veteran labor activist" in the 1980s, I protested then that I was still a young Turk. When my Cornell colleague and labor historian Jefferson Cowie started teaching a course titled "Labor in the 70s" a couple of years ago, I complained, "That's not history, Jeff, it's current events." But when my contemporary Steve Early writes an account of his 1970s entry into the union movement that makes into Labor History, I guess the game is up. We are veterans, though not yet old-timers, please.

Lance Compa's thoughtful response to my "Worker-Student Alliance" piece is much appreciated. It helps illuminate several of the issues I attempted to raise about the importance of rank-and-file leadership development as opposed to an organizer hiring strategy that bypasses experienced union members and focuses instead on enlisting campus activists and other nonmembers, who then become candidates for higher-level union jobs, appointed or elected.

Massive mobilizations, strikes, street conflict, hysterical mass media, social and economic disruption: Chile in 1972-73 Venezuela in 2002-04.

The AFL-CIO is once again on the scene, this time in Venezuela, just as it was in Chile in 1973. Once again, its operations in that country are being funded by the U.S. government. This time, the money is being laundered through the quasi-governmental National Endowment for Democracy, hidden from AFL-CIO members and the American public.