Jane McAlevey

From longtime labor organizer Jane McAlevey, a vital call-to-arms in favor of unions, a key force capable of defending our democracy For decades, racism, corporate greed, and a skewed political system have been eating away at the social and political fabric of the United States. Yet as McAlevey reminds us, there is one weapon whose effectiveness has been proven repeatedly throughout U.S. history: unions. In A Collective Bargain, longtime labor organizer, environmental activist, and political campaigner Jane McAlevey makes the case that unions are a key institution capable of taking effective action against today’s super-rich corporate class. Since the 1930s, when unions flourished under New Deal protections, corporations have waged a stealthy and ruthless war against the labor movement. And they’ve been winning. Until today. Because, as McAlevey shows, unions are making a comeback. Want to reverse the nation’s mounting wealth gap? Put an end to sexual harassment in the workplace? End racial disparities on the job? Negotiate climate justice? Bring back unions. As McAlevey travels from Pennsylvania hospitals, where nurses are building a new kind of patient-centered unionism, to Silicon Valley, where tech workers have turned to old-fashioned collective action, to the battle being waged by America’s teachers, readers have a ringside seat at the struggles that will shape our country—and our future.

Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy

A Collective Bargain

Katy Watkins

Both slavery and union busting are uniquely American in violence, in virulence, and in their existence as fully legally sanctioned.

The NLRA radically changed the power equation in the United States by extending the freedoms of a democracy from the rather limited sphere of civil society into the heart of market capitalism: the economy and the workplace.

You could say that Republicans have taken a page of out of union busters' playbooks. Long before Donald Trump entered the presidential race, employers have been weaponizing many key elements of his campaign strategy against workers who attempt to unionize. I can count as high as exactly zero the number of NLRB elections I've been involved in where the hired union busters didn't stoke racial and/or ethnic divisions early, often, and throughout the campaign; where gerrymandering hasn't been routine (entire units of workers carved out of the list just before the NLRB election); and when voter suppression hasn't been a central part of their strategy.

Billionaires and the corporations that undergird their 1 percent superpower status have so skewed the discussion that we no longer debate a worker's right to strike or even their freedom to assemble in their workplace through a union. With the rise of Silicon Valley, we now argue over whether a worker is even a worker.

A Collective Bargain quotes

Join the club