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“I wanted to write a book that would be not just extolling the virtues of the unions but also would point out some of their difficulties and problems to give a kind of balanced view of them, I mean, not a negative view like a right-winger would give, but from a critical perspective. So, that’s why I wrote the book [Why Unions Matter]. Actually as books published by small presses go, this one has done pretty well, over the years it’s sold pretty well, so we thought since it was the tenth anniversary — last year was — it would be a good time to put out a new edition of the book. So, I went through it and I updated it, I fixed as many errors as I could in the first edition, and we came up with the second edition.” — Michael D. Yates
Michael D. Yates is author of Cheap Motels and a Hotplate: An Economist’s Travelogue (Monthly Review Press, 2007), Naming the System: Inequality and Work in the Global Economy (Monthly Review Press, 2003), Why Unions Matter (Monthly Review Press, 1st Edition published in 1999, new edition to be published in May 2009), and In and Out of the Working Class (Arbeiter Ring, 2009) among many other publications. This interview was aired on KGNU 88.5 FM on 11 June 2009. The interview proper begins about seven minutes into the audio file above. The quotation above is an excerpt from the interview. Read his blog Cheap Motels and a Hotplate: An Economist’s Travelogue at <blog.cheapmotelsandahotplate.org/>.