Unions and Labor Movement

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Furthermore, it suggests that wages and benefits are somehow unifying and other social issues are divisive (Blanton 2003). These separate spheres of influence have resulted in the sad fact that US progressives have often marched in solidarity with labor movements and workers around the world, but often fail to consider the working majority here at home.
For activists striving for social and economic justice, the workplace is a crucial environment for organizing. It is often already organized, and not only when it is unionized; even non-union employees tend to share common hours, lunches and breaks, and most still go every day to a common location. By definition, everyone at the workplace is earning money, so it's a resource-rich community in comparison to many other locations. The production of goods and services occurs there. Decisions of great importance are made and acted upon. It is a place where global capital puts it foot down. And anywhere capital puts its foot down, there ...

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rights and privileges we normally enjoy as citizens (Blanton 2003). Consider how employers, even very progressive employers, feel when asked how they would react to an effort by "their" employees to form a union. The normal response is that such an act is a personal rebuke, a signal of failure and a rejection of their management. Why is such a paternalistic attitude, which would be quickly recognized as such in politics, so widely accepted in employment relations?
But is the workplace really so autocratic? Why such an extreme characterization? Some illustrations of the uniqueness of the work environment, in which the normal rules of our legal system simply do not apply, are worth noting. ...

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