Book review: Maria Carinnes P Alejandria and Will Smith, Disaster Archipelago: Locating Vulnerability and Resilience in the Philippines

Abstract

certainly right that corporate America has largely embraced the “cookbook” and the “strange bedfellows and the messy compromises . . . would have been less problematic had unions been stronger, pension funds better funded, and fiduciary rules more flexible” (p. 224). Nonetheless, what I felt was missing from the book was a larger theoretical assessment of what labor’s hand in finance has been. For example, if public pension funds are contributing to private sector downsizing, what has this meant more broadly for intra-class inequality? Surely, this has stoked divisions by sector, region, or race and reshaped the political environment. Equally warranted is some reflection on Brandeis’ hope in shining “sunlight” on corporate behavior. Transparency is important and has been shown to improve worker wages (Rosenfeld and Denice, 2015). But is this liberal goal really sufficient for redistributing power? More pragmatically, would it galvanize workers enough to sustain the risks of an organizing drive? A bigger question remains too regarding the way finance affects class solidarity. It is well known that the anti-Communist Taft–Hartley Act of 1947 made American labor unions less solidaristic, more conservative, and more defensive of their own membership base. I strongly suspect labor’s financial strategy has not helped in this regard. Yet, “finance” does not just refer to rapacious Wall Street firms. Possibilities exist for radically altering finance for the public good and labor specifically (Block, 2019; McCarthy, 2019). It would have been helpful had Jacoby, who has a deep understanding of this topic, ruminated on these historical lessons. To be fair, Jacoby’s background is in history which is less prone to making theoretical pronouncements. His detailed accounting of an important topic opens space to pursue more work on the topic. Sociologists of labor, organizations, and finance interested in these theoretical questions will find the book to be an excellent starting point.