> as for the legal barriers, let's remember that union members made a good
deal of
> that possible by voting for the Reagan revolution, despite the fact that he
> fired the air traffic controllers.....
I think it has more to do with the companies' own action. For nearly 70 years, since the passage of the National Labor Relations Act, they have been fiddling with their corporate structures and organization of production in order to take advantage of the provisions of labor law and make it as hard as possible to organize effectively. The productive process that was organized in one place by one employer in 1935 is now outsourced, insourced, and split up among twenty different employers in many different locations. Each has to be approached for a separate contract, and so on. I believe this is not just because many ownerships somehow make the process "more efficient". I believe one motive is to screw up the workers' rights under the NLRA.
That is, IF labor organizations are committed to operating under the provisions of the act. You can force a vote on union recognition, and you can get some protections for striking workers (not many now), but to do that you have to adhere to all these provisions.
The question is - and you would need to be more of a labor lawyer than I am to answer this one - are other forms of labor organization PROHIBITED? Or merely disincentivized? Suppose, for example, I say that I want to organize all the workers of this office building, regardless of job description, into one big union, which will bargain with and/or pressure all the employers in this building? Is this something which is -illegal- in the sense that I can be jailed for it? Or is it just that by proceeding in this unconventional way, the new labor organization can't take advantage of the 'protections' of the act, which, however, have been subverted by 70 years of employer and government action, and may not be worth it?
To sum up, at what point does it become advantageous to say, "We are going to organize in the way that best suits our needs - industrial union, geographical union, whatever - and if it doesn't correspond to what is in the NLRA, screw the NLRA, and we will fight our demands the old-fashioned way, with pickets, strikes, etc., without government protection"?
LP