Portside

“Are you going to be able to keep what you have? Are you going to be able to sit at the table as one?” NAACP National President Derrick Johnson asked UAW members, as he urged them to avoid division based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender.

“If collective bargaining is undermined in Canada, and the right to strike is part of their collective bargaining rights, our collective bargaining rights are also under attack in the United States”

Sports unions employee a 'empowerment unionism' strategy that sees the contract as a basic framework that sets some minimum thresholds and establishes a procedure for resolving disputes. Workers are free to negotiate their own salaries.

A federal judge in Washington has struck down keys parts of President Trump's executive orders that would have made it easier to fire federal employees.

A new collective bargaining law--supported by the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity--requires local unions to prove they represent a majority of the teachers in their districts. The measuring stick? At least half of all employees eligible to be in the union must be paying dues.

Under a new anti-union law, public-sector unions must re-certify each time they’re scheduled to bargain new contracts, every two or three years. Right-wing backers of the law hoped it would weaken unions by forcing them to devote time and resources to the recertification process and lead workers to drop their membership. But the members of the state's 468 union locals voted overwhelmingly to stick with their union.

The NLRB has found these forced arbitration agreements interfere with workers’ right to engage in concerted activity for their mutual aid and protection, in violation of the NLRA.

Some critics, including some in the labor movement, suggest that unions have to abandon collective bargaining and pursue other strategies for worker gains, such as winning higher wages through legislation. But collective bargaining can still work, and it is still necessary.

We never know what is actually possible until we test it. It may seem a long road from a union trying to protect jobs to a union setting out an alternative agenda for the economy. But surely the main lesson of recent years is that since capitalist corporations think big as a matter of course then we will surely lose if we continue to think small. If we don't raise our expectations, they will be lowered for us. •