Source: Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, Vol. 9 no. 2, Summer 2012
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From the introduction:
…The Up for Debate Section features Dennis Deslippe’s revisionist argument about labor’s response to affirmative action. Deslippe seeks a middle path between those scholars who have fixed the unions as a primary obstacle to affirmative action plans pushed by civil rights organizations and to those who have identified affirmative action as an unalterable stumbling block for collective (as opposed to individual) rights on the job…. The respondents give Deslipps mixed marks…

Debaters include:
On the Importance of Affirmative Action: Labor Liberals and the Recasting of “Contract Unionism” by Dennis Deslippe

Union Job Protection Equals Discrimination by Paul Moreno

Affirmative Action and the Unhappy Marriage of Union Rights and Equality Rights by Ava Baron

Details, Details: Unions, Affirmative Action, and the Deslippe Thesis by Joseph A. McCartin

Does the Exception Prove the Rule? By William P. Jones

Response by Dennis Deslippe