This is a really terrible article. It offers a tendentious history of trade unionism, missing out on the differences between the AFL and the CIO for instance. But at a basic level, who is going to organize for these universal rights, and more significantly, who is going to act as an everyday defender of those rights. At its most basic level, union organizing is an attempt to transform the relations of power within a workplace, generally on the grounds of 'dignity' and 'rights' for the employee. It creates horizontal relations between workers in opposition to the employer with access to financial and other resources in times of need. Legislature can provide a 'shield' for that kind of work, but it can't replace the 'sword' of collective worker action. (two notes: I'm not assuming this is the only or primary site of struggle, and I am operating under the premises laid out by Rosa Luxemburg in the Mass Strike, which is everyday organizing is the laboratory of a future revolutionary politics.)
robert wood
> Michael Lind on the ongoing fight in Wisconsin:
>
> "Liberals must ask themselves whether defending archaic 1950s-style
> employment
> and benefit arrangements that survive as fossil relics in the public
> sector
> fits into a plausible and potentially popular vision of a reformed
> American
> social contract in the 21st century. The goal of liberal reform should be
> to
> phase out employer-based benefits entirely, in favor of universal,
> contributory
> social insurance programs. Deprived of employer benefits to offer their
> members, unions might still bargain with employers over workplace rules
> and
> wages. But from a liberal perspective, it would be better if workplace
> regulations were universal and imposed by legislation, rather than
> piecemeal
> and achieved by collective bargaining."
>
> http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/02/22/lind_unions_wisconsin/index.html
>
>
>
>
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