Writer Steven Malanga has been their primary national voice. Malanga was given a grant by the Brunie Fund for New York Journalism to mount the initial attack in New York's City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute last summer. Charles Brunie is the institute's chairman emeritus. Like the Pacific Research Institute, the Manhattan Institute is a conduit for funds coming from some of the nation's most conservative foundations--$475,000 from Sarah Scaife and $585,000 from the Bradley Foundation between 2000 and 2002. The John M. Olin Foundation, which gave $951,000, is represented on the Manhattan Institute's board by James Piereson.

"Increasingly, these programs have come to define their mission chiefly as supporting labor and its organizing efforts rather than educating students," Malanga says. Like the PRI, he singles out those activities carried on by labor studies programs that affect the poor and immigrants, heaping scorn on studies defending the minimum wage and supporting living-wage ordinances.

One suspects that Malanga would not have been satisfied, even twenty years ago, with a business-union approach to labor studies. Yet he yearns for that past "when labor bosses were culturally conservative, supported pro-growth policies, and sent their hardhats to battle long-haired students over the war in Vietnam." Today, he fulminates, labor studies programs "dispatch student interns to help unions organize" and "use classrooms to push the labor movement's tendentious views of privatization, globalization, and corporate America," substituting "propaganda and activism for the disinterested pursuit of truth."

Of course, the discussions in college classrooms of privatization and globalization, or even the miserable wages of the university's own immigrant janitors (not to mention teaching assistants themselves) are not held as a result of orders from the AFL-CIO. These are burning questions for a whole generation of young people. Labor studies programs that don't engage them run the risk of being irrelevant, and left without students. Juravich says simply, "Students are less interested in the AFL, and more in sweatshops."

The program at the University of Massachusetts was also reorganized in the early 1990s. According to Juravich, the old labor studies programs made the mistake of clinging to a service model for curriculum. "Our program and California's moved away from that. We don't wait for the labor movement to tell us what to do. We initiated research into the work force of our area, like the 3,000 fish-processing workers in New Bedford. We do strategic research for organizing, to see how power flows. I understand that feels inappropriate to people threatened by our independence and the strategic nature of what we do. That's why our field is in crisis, with an attack on the major player and on our funding. It's a very dangerous time."

Following his first foray against labor studies, Malanga wrote a second City Journal article this fall, in which he repeated the same distortions peddled by the ABC and its recall allies. This time he accused the ILE of digging up "dirt on major property owners and investors, studying ways to organize young workers in California's supermarket industry, and researching how best to fight the privatization of welfare services." Like his friends at PRI, he too ends with a threat. "The fat public funding for projects of questionable academic value is unlikely to survive in the new Schwarzenegger era--along with the fat public funding for unneeded layers of unionized government employees."

The long knives are out, and the ILE may just be the first to feel their sharp cuts.

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